Focus: The crying game

Viewing the spectacle of a woman I once admired digging herself ever deeper holes and unfailingly tumbling into them has not filled me with the kind of glee expressed in some quarters.

Rather a sense of profound disappointment.

Cherie Blair's performance on Tuesday evening would have won her an Oscar, but not too many fans among what, in the past, would have been her natural constituency – those of us who were never too keen on the way she took standing by her man to nauseatingly winsome limits, but who, at the same time, gasped in awe at her achievements. She survived a difficult childhood, made good use of a brain a teacher described as one of the best she'd ever encountered, rose to the top of a famously female-unfriendly profession and had a baby in her forties without so much as missing a beat. A role model and a half.

I do have some sympathy with Cherie's need for a friend such as Carole Caplin. All of us who have appeared in the public eye know how galling it is to have attention paid to the way we look rather than what we have achieved. We'd all try to include in our circle a woman who's a bit of a goddess and rely on her taste, excuse her foibles, and maybe even pull a few strings on her behalf. Although I suspect I may have become a little cautious if she'd offered to scrub me down in the shower or appeared at a family dinner in a wholly inappropriate see-through top. As Cherie stood up to deliver her explanation I waited for an honest confession and apology – "Guilty as charged, yer honour, mea culpa, sorry," – and a swift conclusion to the story. It never came. Instead she played the wounded victim to perfection, which was fine for the late Princess of Wales but sat rather ill on a woman with a declared ambition to sit on the bench as a High Court judge. There were even tears, a disgraceful deployment of the oldest manipulative trick in the female arsenal. I could only conclude that her father's acting talent runs in her genes, but she had fatally misjudged her audience.

Like Cherie, I'm also a mother with a more than full-time job, a significant commitment to good works and a beloved son who's just gone off to university, leaving a huge and fiercely protective hole in my heart. We're all juggling too many balls in the air and inevitably drop a few, but they tend to be of the "Oops, Mr Inspector, I forgot to buy a ticket at the station" variety. When Cherie was given a penalty fare for riding a Thameslink train without paying a couple of years ago it was possible to feel sympathy and understanding. But trusting a man who is a convicted fraudster to negotiate the purchase of half a million pounds worth of property, and having faith that he'll keep quiet about it, isn't dropping a ball. It's dropping a socking great clanger.

Credulity was stretched to the limit when we learnt that papers regarding Foster's deportation case had found their way into her private office, but she hadn't actually looked at them; and that she couldn't have commented on the views of the judge who would have conducted the hearing because she hadn't met him. After all these years as a QC and recorder, does she really expect us to believe that she doesn't know what the rest of us who only watch Judge John Deed see played out week after week? The upper echelon of the legal profession is portrayed, and I have no reason to believe the dramatist has got it wrong, as a highly politicised nest of vipers in which everybody knows where everybody else is coming from.

What concerns me most is the breathtaking political naivety that Cherie has displayed throughout this affair. She is not an elected politician but, as an avowed feminist, she must be aware that one of the first rules of the women's movement stated "the personal is political". At a time when every middle-class parent in the land is having kittens about proposals for student top-up fees, backed by the Prime Minister, how could she have thought it would enhance her husband's reputation when it came out, as inevitably it would, that they had bought their boy £250,000 of posh pad to live in? Everyone else is struggling to come up with the £300 a month it costs just to keep a kid in a hall of residence.

Conversely, if she's a purely private individual, a woman of independent means who doesn't even tell her husband she's about to shell out her family's entire fortune on a property deal, and has no other motive than the comfort and protection of her son, why did she not have the courage of her convictions and stand up for herself as Cherie Booth QC immediately it became obvious there were forces out to get her? Why did she expect Cherie Blair's economy with the truth to be drip fed via sources close to the Prime Minister?

She has, I'm afraid, blown it, and not only on her own behalf. She's been at best stupid, and at worst a spinner of whopping great porky pies. Neither quality is welcome in one who will sit in judgment on others as a judge.

Her excuse for silliness was to state that women really can't manage it all. At a time when there are no female Law Lords, only three female appeal court judges out of 36, and only seven women out of 109 judges sitting in the High Court, she simply gives ammunition to those crusty old buffers who believe women really should be back in the kitchen. Now she's not so much a role model as a lesson to us all. If you have a reputation to guard, keep the radar scanning for users and abusers; and if you want to shatter the glass ceiling, you have to take the shards like a man.

Jenni Murray is an author and presenter of 'Woman's Hour' on Radio 4