For a close and loving couple who have sex five times a night, the Blairs would seem to have a communication problem when it comes to discussing their personal arrangements.
You may remember that when Mrs Blair, with the help of Australian conman Peter Foster, bought two flats in Bristol for about £600,000 the first that Mr Blair knew of the purchase was when he read about it in a newspaper.
Similarly, one has to imagine a recent scene at the Blair breakfast table when the couple discovered that by a happy chance they were both going to be in Washington at the same time this month - Mr Blair meeting his trusted friend and fellow crusader, George W Bush, Mrs Blair delivering a lecture in exchange, it is reported, for a fee of £30,000.
Well, just fancy that. What could be a greater boost for the lecture than the simultaneous presence in Washington of her Prime Minister husband. And maybe the publicity engendered will help to boost the flagging sales of Cherie's book, The Goldfish Bowl, about life behind the scenes at Downing Street.
We will wait to see what message Mr Blair will be taking to the Americans while Mrs Blair is delivering her lucrative lecture. Will he perhaps reiterate his thoughts about the need to restore respect at all levels of public life? Or will somebody point out that there might be an awkward contradiction between advocating respect at the same time as your money-grabbing wife is once again using her position to cash in and make as much as possible before you are finally forced to leave the public stage?
Mum's the word
My dear old mother was proud of the fact that she had taught her four sons to read before we went to school at the age of five. She had no teacher training and would have been indignant at any suggestion that she was not properly qualified to teach children how to read.
She might have added, along with many other parents, that learning to read was no big deal. But try telling that to the hundreds of education experts who make a living not just teaching but devising different methods of teaching. Not with any great success, it would seem, in light of the fact that, even today, one child in five leaves primary school unable to read.
And now there is to be yet another inquiry, set up last week by the distinctly uncharismatic Education Secretary Ruth Kelly, aided now by Mr Blair's special friend (equally uncharismatic) Lord Adonis, to consider a return to the so-called phonic method of teaching literacy. All this after eight years of New Labour with its often-expressed priority of improving education.
Despairing parents could be excused if they decided to take the job on themselves, but this will not be a course of action that either Ruth Kelly or Lord Adonis would necessarily recommend.
Teaching children how to read is a highly specialised skill which should be undertaken only by those with the necessary qualifications and diplomas. Better to leave it to the professionals, once, that is, they have conducted their latest six-month inquiry into the best way of going about it.
Taken for a ride
The Oldie, the magazine I edit, introduced a new feature in its latest issue. 'Reprint of the Month' will recommend an old book that has recently been republished. Our first choice, for example, was True Grit by American journalist Charles Portis.
Simultaneously, as it happens, the commercial radio station LBC has launched its own Book of the Month feature. The difference is that their book is chosen not for its merit but because the publisher has paid LBC £10,000 for the privilege.
I would expect Oldie readers to be more than upset if they discovered that our Reprint of the Month had been paid for by a publisher and had nothing to do with any editorial decision.
But this is not the view of LBC, which has refused demands to make clear that the Book of the Month is an advertisement.
'Anyone who is a savvy radio listener,' a spokesman said, 'will be aware of how advertisements and sponsorship works. It is not the sort of thing you would explain to a punter.'
This is a good example of the current approach to marketing, which applies not only to books. What it amounts to is this: people, or punters, now will expect to be conned, deceived and lied to by the likes of commercial radio stations. When they hear talk of books of the month, these savvy folk know that they are being taken for a ride by a bunch of canny geezers. So what's all the fuss about?