Tony Booth: There's no escaping the in-law from hell

The IoS Profile: In a famous TV role he was adept at winding up Alf Garnett; in real life, it's the PM who cops it

But for the fact that he has already starred in one epoch-making situation comedy, Tony Booth would surely have another one should he choose to develop it. As the father of Cherie Booth QC, and the father-in-law of the Prime Minister, Booth could easily surpass the impact he made back in the Sixties, when he played the left-wing "Scouse git" son-in-law to Warren Mitchell's loquacious bigot Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part.

Imagine the scene: Sunday lunchtime at Chequers, and the family retire to the drawing-room for coffee. Tony the elder starts to give Tony the younger a hard time about the long-severed link between the annual increase in state pensions and the rise in the average wage.

"Stop picking on him, dad!" shouts his barrister daughter.

"I'm only trying to inculcate him with true working-class socialist instincts, rather than the bourgeois indifference to the class struggle with which he was imbued, love!" Booth responds.

"Look," says Blair. "It's impossible to provide adequately for future generations let alone today's oldies, so people have to make their own provisions – I mean, you're round here all the time!" (cue studio-audience laughter).

OK, maybe it's not such a good idea, but last week the Daily Mail enjoyed the next best thing, serialising Booth's autobiography, What's Left?. Extracts appeared under the strapline of "Father- in-Law From Hell", detailing Booth's relationship with Cherie and Tony, as well as tales of his wild social life, occasional tragedies and unpredictable acting career. It was a two-for-one coup, especially as Booth now regularly speaks out against government policies and personalities.

This is nothing new. For here is a man who won the part of Alf Garnett's son-in-law when he was filmed heckling the Labour minister George Brown at a rally in 1964. These days, he's just as likely to heckle the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. At a Labour conference fringe meeting in 1999, Booth scorned the assumption that Gordon Brown could be given the party leadership when Tony Blair stood down. It was one of his first outbursts that could be construed as an attack on his son-in-law. Others have followed, notably on pensions, with Booth joining former union leader Jack Jones in a long-running campaign. By now Blair, growing used to what he has referred to as "a little bit of grief from Tony along the way", will have realised that, while you can choose your wife, you can't choose your in-laws.

Booth infiltrated the Blairs' lives back in the late Seventies. He had left Cherie's mother, Gale, not just in pursuit of other women – a new relationship had produced two more daughters – but also of an acting career. That left Cherie and her sister, Lyndsey, to be brought up in Liverpool without a father.

Early repertory work, after National Service, had encouraged Booth to believe that he could earn a living as an actor. Times were changing – the Fifties saw the appearance of "kitchen-sink" dramas and Northern-based films, when actors with working-class backgrounds became popular. Booth had already begun an affair with a Mancunian actress named Patricia Pilkington, but headed south. While he roistered his way around London, scrambling for any old work, she changed her surname to Phoenix and became the much-loved Northern vamp Elsie Tanner in Granada's new drama series, Coronation Street.

Booth's foray into the London acting scene was unsuccessful, and was also marred by heavy drinking. While work proved elusive, he at least enjoyed the triumph of Liverpool MP Harold Wilson, in 1964, when he became the first Labour prime minister since Clement Attlee lost to Winston Churchill in 1951.

But Booth's ambivalent attitude to the Labour Party seemed the same then as it is now – the hard left opposed pay freezes and Polaris missiles – but at least his personal protests won him a dream role, for Johnny Speight, the creator of Till Death, was also a man of the left. His raucous comedy, launched in 1964, was an attempt to satirise working-class prejudices by way of the monstrous Alf Garnett, a bitter, rancorous man who couldn't cope with the new age of immigration, left-wing politics, and youthful fashions and morality.

Warren Mitchell, as Alf, delivered a tour de force but there were concerns that the audience was not laughing at the bigot, but with him. Booth's role, as the long-haired Liverpudlian socialist, was to oppose his father-in-law in almost every way, to teach him what we now call political correctness.

Ron Rose, a writer and former Labour councillor in Doncaster, who has been a long-term friend of Booth's, says: "Tony was just playing himself in that role. The politics of the character were more or less his own." The series was a huge hit, topping the ratings and winning awards across the spectrum.

Booth enjoyed his sudden fame and comparative wealth. He fathered three more daughters during this period, with two different partners – one of these daughters, Sarah, later became Lauren, the other media Booth with a penchant for disrupting the Blair household.

But drink and gambling debts took a heavy toll on Booth. His wife in Till Death, Una Stubbs, monitored the change, seeing him go from "a great big gentle bear" to someone unable to learn his lines. Drink was eating away at him. "It was just terrifying to watch," she says.

"I was an appalling person, bleeding inside and out," Booth now recognises. And as he drifted into further trouble – court appearances, tax debts, bankruptcy – his career nose-dived. He eventually left Till Death and its sequel, popping up instead in the dire British sex-comedy Confessions of a Window-Cleaner. Leslie Halliwell's Filmgoers Companion described him as "a general-purpose actor: everything from Nazis to layabouts".

His decline culminated in a horrific domestic fire as he fell into a drum of paraffin while climbing into his house drunk. He suffered 50 per cent burns, and was pronounced dead three times in hospital. But as he pulled around, the first visitor was his eldest daughter, Cherie, and reconciliation was born.

Cherie had made her own way in life: grammar school, the London School of Economics, and now the Bar. She wanted to introduce her dad to the young barrister she was about to marry. So when Tony met Tony, in 1979, it was the older one who put him in touch with the Labour Party, by way of an old friend, Tom, now Lord, Pendry. Pendry gave young Blair a tour of the Commons, and by 1982 he was contesting the unwinnable Beaconsfield seat in a by-election, with Tony Booth and Pat Phoenix canvassing for him. A year later, he was in Parliament as MP for Sedgefield, with a very proud father-in-law looking on. When Phoenix died in 1986, both Blair and Cherie were mourners at a very public funeral.

Realistically, Blair must have known what he was in for with Booth, albeit a sober one, in the family, so the father-in-law's regular appearances on the Today programme and his tabloid excursions are probably no more embarrassing for him than Mark Thatcher was to his mother.

Booth has now married for the fourth time, called time on fatherhood at eight daughters, and seems to revel in his role as an Old Labour voice in the Blair household. Booth's father once made a remark, probably a Scouse joke, about the trouble an alleged ancestor, John Wilkes Booth, caused when he became an actor. But there seems little likelihood of this Booth doing as much damage to Blair as his "relative" did to Abraham Lincoln.