One Week With John Gulliver - The Blair chic of Cherie?

THE last time I saw Cherie Blair up close she was sitting alone, almost forlornly, on a stone ledge at the top of the stairs at a chambers in Gray’s Inn Road.
I was standing at the foot of the stairs in the midst of a hectic party thrown by barristers for a reason I cannot now recall. The room was full of laughter and smiling faces.
Cherie didn’t look as if she was enjoying it one bit. She looked far away, sunk in a pool of loneliness.
I made my way towards her to ask her about life at No10 that she had just moved into following her husband’s triumph at the polls in 1997.
But before I reached her someone called out to her and she disappeared.
The next time I saw her again, up close, was as she moved out of the double doors of the chapel at Golders Green crematorium, minutes after the funeral service for Michael Foot had concluded on Monday afternoon.
All around her were people she would have known fairly intimately, such as Neil Kinnock, but she just gazed ahead, again that look of distance I recognised from my last near encounter 10 years ago.
She was walking close to the wife of another ex-prime minister – Mary Wilson, now 94, who navigated the steps with a frail though steady gait.
I assume Cherie was concentrating on keeping an eye on Mrs Wilson. But that still didn’t explain that certain distant look in her eyes.
Then my eyes became fixated by something that struck me as being a little bit out of place at the funeral of such a public ­figure as Michael Foot.
All around her, emerging from the chapel, were sombre-suited men, and  women who seemed to have taken great trouble to wear costumes suitable for the occasion.  
But Cherie was carrying one of the high fashion statements of our times – a very large Louis Vuitton handbag presumably costing at least £500, in contrast with a small, old-fashioned black bag worn across the shoulders of Mrs Wilson.
Mrs Wilson, I gather, made her way through the mourners, and was driven past the house she and her husband Harold used to inhabit in nearby Hampstead Garden Suburb.  
Many of the mourners left for a reception at Keats House in Hampstead but I didn’t see Cherie there. If I had, I would have asked her about that handbag!