Then I hit his face, now I'm a believer

Shortly after having left his local mosque, Shamso Miah went into a bank. He had a row with another man in the bank queue and hit him twice, fracturing his jaw. His case was heard by Cherie Blair or Cherie Booth QC, as she's known when she's doing the judging who generously announced that:

I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before... You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.

The Heresiarch finds her comments quite surprising.

In other news:

Osama Bin Laden would find himself at the sharp end of a £200 fine if he was tried in a British court, Cherie Blair said last night...

Mrs Blair stressed that until he started organising a systematic campaign of devastating suicide attacks against western targets, Mr Bin Laden had never been in trouble before.

She added: "Recruiting hundreds of disillusioned young men and training them to become mass killers is not acceptable behaviour, but he's a religious man and so obviously he already knows that.

That last quote was from The Daily Mash, may Allah bless it and grant it peace.

It doesn't come as any surprise to me that the woman's two coupons short of a pop-up toaster. Cherie and that husband of hers have form going back years. Mad as a sack of badgers, the pair of them. Here's the magnificent Francis Wheen, with memories of the Blairs in their wacky prime:

Cherie Blair finds her devout Catholicism no impediment to flirtations with New Age spirituality, as she proved by inviting a Feng Shui expert to rearrange the furniture at No 10 and wearing a magic pendant known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with "a matrix of specially-cut quartz crystals" that surround the wearer with "a cocoon of energy" and ward off evil forces. Last December, amid the frenzy of media indignation at the discovery that the conman Peter Foster had helped the Blairs buy two flats in Bristol, some of us were far more alarmed by the disclosures about Foster's girlfriend Carole Caplin, who is employed by the prime minister's wife as a 'lifestyle guru'. Through Caplin, Mrs Blair has been introduced to an 86-year-old 'dowsing healer', Jack Temple, who treated Cherie's swollen ankles by swinging a crystal pendulum and giving her strawberry leaves grown within the 'electro-magnetic field' of a neolithic circle he has built in his back garden.

It was long assumed that Tony Blair, who wears his Christianity on his sleeve, did not share his wife's unorthodox enthusiasms. In 1999 he demanded the resignation of the England football coach Glenn Hoddle, who had told an interviewer that disabled people were paying off the bad karma they collected in previous incarnations. Blair thought this "offensive", though it was not discernibly more offensive than the doctrine of original sin held by many of his fellow Christians. Besides, from a Buddhist viewpoint Hoddle was quite correct: no less a figure than the Dalai Lama confirmed as much, but added that "if you live in a Christian country, you should keep these views to yourself. It is difficult to have a mish-mash of religions".

Not so, as Blair confirmed when he and his wife underwent a 'rebirthing experience' under the supervision of one Nancy Aguilar while holidaying on the Mexican Riviera in the summer of 2001. The prime ministerial mudbath was revealed by New Humanist contributor Tom Baldwin in a gobsmacking report for the Times:

"Ms Aguilar told the Blairs to bow and pray to the four winds as Mayan prayers were read out…Within the Temazcal, a type of Ancient Mayan steam bath, herb-infused water was thrown over heated lava rocks, to create a cleansing sweat and balance the Blairs' 'energy flow'."

Ms Aguilar chanted Mayan songs, told the Blairs to imagine that they could see animals in the steam and explained what such visions meant. They were told the Temazcal was like the womb and those participating in the ritual must confront their hopes and fears before 'rebirth' and venturing outside. The Blairs were offered watermelon and papaya, then told to smear what they did not eat over each other's bodies along with mud from the Mayan jungle outside.

The prime minister, on holiday just a month before the 11 September attacks, is understood to have made a wish for world peace.