It was like watching a form of Chinese torture. Having managed to answer just 10 questions in five days from British reporters, come Tuesday in a Beijing university, Tony Blair bumped up against a hostile, hour-long interrogation from a bunch of suspiciously well-informed Chinese students, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Among the least stinging of the questions, was one from a politely smiling girl: "Can you tell me honestly, like talking to your own children, that you never lied on the Iraq war?"
Thus ensued a lecturette on democracy - unprecedented in the annals of exquisitely delicate British-Chinese diplomacy - before someone finally got bored of his evasions and shouted: "Sing us a song".
In terms of what might be expected from visiting dignitaries, the request was off the scale. Maybe they knew of Blair's previous incarnation as lead vocalist in a college band called - aptly, as it turns out - The Ugly Rumours.
For the first time, the PM looked truly rattled. Eyes darting, body twitching, he yelped: "Where's my wife?" Step forward a disbelieving Cherie - "They want us to sing? They want me to sing?" Well, no, Cherie, they did not name you specifically. Basically, your husband is dumping you in it . . .
Another disbelieving exchange - "You can sing anything you like", suggests Tony, magnanimously - and Cherie concedes. Hand clamped to hip, eyes accusingly on her husband, she takes the microphone and tentatively starts to warble When I'm 64.
While Tony barely manages to mouth the chorus - terrified, probably, of being seen to stamp all over Dr David Kelly's still warm body - she managed to overcome her mortification and ups the volume as the students clap along.
A diversionary tactic, scripted to give the press something silly to write home about? It didn't look like it. Either way, Cherie is a trouper. She, better than any woman in the western world and with her deep insecurity about her looks, knew how the pictures would look.
No doubt, the most recent piece of "advice" delivered by former Tory spin doctor, Amanda Platell, sprang to mind : "Shut your mouth literally and figuratively. That insincere smile swathed in red lipstick makes you look like a clown."
But like any supportive, political mate, she knows the score.
Do what it takes, win the audience, get the vote, even if it means drawing attention to that cruelly-mocked mouth. She left the Beijing hall a heroine; her husband, as the man who, in the words of one student, "did not answer my question".
She has, say reporters on Blair's doom-laden round-the-world tour, been the heart and soul of it, his rock and his sanity at what many believe to be one of the lowest points of his life.
Yet she is one of the most derided of women, ripped apart for her fashion sense, her physical appearance, her miscarriage, briefed against even by Alastair Campbell during the Bristol apartments row.
Cherie Blair is living proof of the impossibility of the task set for the wife of a public figure. Few will be ready to shed tears for ice-cold Mary Archer, for example, but was a welcome home embrace ever so closely analysed?
Even as Jeffrey puckered up for his kiss, she consciously kept her radiant face towards the cameras, smiling broadly and supremely controlled.
Then again, what did we expect? She will never be the kind of woman who gives way to her feelings in public - especially as well-heeled locals drive past in their Audis shouting "Bastards!" at the press.
Academically brilliant, determined and loyal to a fault - just like Cherie Blair - she has never been less than a dutiful wife.
But is that enough? Yesterday, one tabloid devoted an entire page to the fact that the red-and-white silk sleeveless dress she had worn to greet Jeffrey on Monday, was on her again on Tuesday morning as she left their Thames-side flat, where - as it pointed out helpfully - "she keeps no clothes".
She looked like a woman who had had a good night, opined an "onlooker" "but it seemed a bit weird to be wearing the same dress".
Who could this "onlooker" be, so freakishly interested in Mary Archer's wardrobe, so fortunate to be on the spot just as Mary was leaving?
And if the dress was a serious offence, imagine the reaction if, instead of staying in London with Jeffrey, Mary had legged it back to the country home the night before?
But let's not downplay what happened here. Mary Archer had perpetrated "the ultimate fashion faux pas . . . Much, much worse than turning up at an event in the same outfit as someone else, it was either audacity or stupidity."
Here's a thought for the spouses of Ireland's public figures as they set off on their holidays. Do you know how lucky you are at all?