Cherie Blair has told of her “deep sense of relief” she did not have to stand next to Nicholas Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni on her visit to Britain.

In an interview with US magazine Vanity Fair she joked it was not a “fair comparison” - the French president’s wife is a former supermodel.

She added she liked to think of herself as someone who might be “a role model for people who want to become lawyers”.

Mrs Blair said history would judge her husband, former PM Tony, “very well”.

“He’ll be up there with Churchill,” she argued. 

Mrs Blair, a high-ranking lawyer, went on to suggest that David Beckham might be “someone who could be a role model for people who want to become footballers” and Gordon Brown “a role model for people who want to become unemployed”.

When asked if she felt her comments were an admission that beauty was more important than brains for women, she added, “only if you look like an ostrich”.

Asked to elaborate further on her comparison between Tony Blair and Churchill she noted, accurately, that “Churchill once said he didn’t understand why people got upset about the gassing of uncivilised tribes. My husband considers towel-heads to be uncivilised, so he bombed the living bejezus out of them, most weeks, for years.”

In a continuation of its policy of publishing insufferably rhetorical codswallop, next month’s Vanity Fair will feature an article penned by Mrs Thatcher in which she will assert her belief that “having extremely rich friends high up in the media makes one’s rabidly capitalist agenda much easier to spin.”

Tags: politics, britain, carla bruni, cherie blair, women who look like ostriches, tony blair

[Carla] Bruni talks in the book for the first time of her whirlwind romance, past lovers and her recording career. She describes the dinner party last November where she was invited as a blind date for the newly divorced President [Nicolas Sarkozy].

“It all happened suddenly. I wasn’t expecting someone so funny, so full of life. I was seduced by his physique and his intelligence,” she says. “He has five or six brains which are remarkably irrigated.”

When asked to clarify her statement, Bruni leaned back and began to count on her impeccably manicured fingers.  “Well, there is of course his political mind, that is brain number one.  And his sensitivity, the way he treats a woman!—that is number two.  Brain three would have to be his masterful ability at backgammon.  And numbers four through six, of course, are his penis and so-cute little butt.”

After a lengthy silence, Ms Bruni continued.  “Perhaps you are confused that those would only count for brains four and five?  But I give extra credit, because, well… you know.”

Tags: politics, france, love, carla bruni, brains four through six, nicolas sarkozy