To book call 0131 2260000 or visit .. Say what you like about the ghastly faux-intimacy of modern, popular-culture driven, trivia-obsessed life. But at least nowadays the more nosy among us don’t have to run the risk of meeting the eye of an outraged householder as we meander along the road squinting shamelessly into other people’s homes. This week, as usual, the entire population has had the opportunity to poke around in innumerable living spaces. The one that has added most to the gaiety of the nation though, has got to be Tony and Cherie’s place.Not that Tony was there. Instead, when Marie Claire spent a day with Cherie Blair, there was no husbandly manifestation Young Leo did feature, out in the garden with his nanny.

But the intimate presence in Mrs Blair’s life, as in her son’s, was not a relation but a paid companion, the very lovely Ms Carole Caplin.Quite a stir was created by the sight of Ms Caplin, wielding a lip-brush and gesturing to the camera, on the brink of touching up the lips of a puckered and supplicant Cherie. Quite a stir was also created by the small signs of untidiness around the Blairs’ Downing Street flat. “What woman,” asked the massed harridans of Fleet Street, “wouldn’t tidy up before a photographer came to her house? If Cherie thinks she’s showing her ordinariness by showing her mess, then she’s even more out-of-touch than we thought she was.”Actually, though, I think they’re all mistaken. Far from calculatedly leaving mess, Mrs Blair probably didn’t even register that these minor tangles of household detritus could even be construed as mess. One of the more endearing idiosyncrasies of Mrs Blair is that she has a reputation as one of the world’s worst housekeepers. Before her husband became Prime Minister, the Blairs lived in utter domestic chaos, with the creed of the slattern elevated almost to an art form. This might not be admirable, but at least it’s human.Things are different now, which is why Mrs Blair long ago stopped muddling through, and instead acquired Ms Caplin, right from the moment when her husband became party leader, as her “lifestyle guru”.

Or “consultant and writer in areas of health, fitness and wellbeing”, as Ms Caplin told Hello! this week.And how much better about herself Ms Caplin must be feeling. Having held Mrs Blair’s hand as well as her lippy, as she guided her charge into making a spectacle of her intimate life in Marie Claire and all other media, Ms Caplin herself chose the easier option of a fully styled interview and shoot in – and on the cover of – the celebrity-fawn title Hello!There she is, at exactly the same time as the pictures of Mrs Blair’s own disastrous PR exercise hit the news stands, inviting all who care to into her own lovely home. It, of course, is pristinely tidy, marred only by the constant presence of a cheesy young woman in a giddying plethora of figure-hugging outfits. My own favourite is one of Ms Caplin in split-sided leather trousers and barely-there white top, perched on shag pile and cushions, staring challengingly into the lens.It’s not the picture in itself so much as the hilarious contrast with the quote from Ms Caplin that adorns it: “There’s no special man in my life at the moment.