Cherie Blair - a return to straight-talking politics?

7.30 on a very grey Manchester morning - the classic North-west sky colour, any time of year. The hotel room window is thin and ill-fitting, hence I am typing this with an earful of the lorries and buses in the big traffic queue.

On this Conference Tuesday the BBC breakfast news is desperately trying to focus on what Tony Blair will say in his speech - but the newspapers are mostly leading on the story that Cherie Blair said "it's a lie" when listening to Brown talking about how well he and Blair got on.

This is a very hard story to verify as only one person, Bloomberg producer Carolin Lotter, claims to have heard Cherie saying "it's a lie". The initial story from Bloomberg was that Cherie had walked out of the conference hall during the speech. This has since been revised (perhaps due to conflicting eyewitness reports?) but Bloomberg have not retracted the "lie" quote.

Clearly it would be very easy for a reporter simply to make a story like this up and the evidence for Cherie's outburst is about as thin as it comes. Having said that, the story completely upstaged Gordon's performance, which as I said in my previous post, was not that memorable in the first place. And I think we do owe either Cherie Blair or Carolin Lotter a debt of gratitude for puncturing Gordon Brown (and Tony Blair's) attempt to airbrush the history of their relationship. Everyone who has been even vaguely involved with the Number 10 or 11 operations knows that Brown and Blair hate each other's guts and have done probably since about 1998 and certainly since the attempt to elbow Brown off the organisation of the election campaign in 2005 and replace him with Alan Milburn, honorary president of "Amoebas For Blair". That failed when it became painfully obvious that Milburn was not up to running a kebab outlet, and Brown had to be parachuted back in to save the campaign. Which he did, just about. But nobody believed the party political broadcast where Tony buys Gordon an icecream (or was it the other way round?) and no-one believes this eyewash about them having made up now either. So Cherie - or Bloomberg's Cherie avatar - deserves some credit for saying what everyone was thinking anyway.