With Friends of Friends Like These

Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister, avoids most publicity but has entered that weird zone of modern celebrity where everything she does makes news. And like a character from a reality TV show, she learned last week that tabloid morality tales need both heroes and goats, all the more mesmerizing if they are the same person. At first the newspapers loved her tale of pluck: she grew up in a working-class neighborhood; she and her mother were abandoned by her dad, a famous-old-rogue actor, yet she scored the highest grade in the country on her law exams; she has...