New Labour's rebirth

'John Prescott, in a loincloth, was waving a clump of burning sage. He was "clearing the energy", he said. Who's to say it didn't work?'

There will doubtless be mutterings from the usual quarters at the news that the New Age guru Mrs Sylvia Caplin has been helping Cherie Blair to reach for her inner centre. We live in a materialist age, and the idea that the Prime Minister's wife could actually be using channelling, rebirthing, crystal-reading, Mayan earth chanting, flower therapy and aura-reading to release her negative mental toxins seems unlikely to be understood by the cynical majority who live in a negative energy field. Here we go again, they'll say. First it was Ronald Reagan, then Princess Diana. Now the first lady of Downing Street has been seduced by the lure of alternative lifestyles.

I take a more broadminded attitude. The press reports published over the past week have indicated that Cherie is gaining much inner help from Mrs Caplin, who is a psychic and healer, and from her daughter Carole, once a page three model, now born again as a lifestyle guru, fitness adviser and colour stylist.

Mrs Caplin has a wide variety of talents, we are told. She channels – "bringing down the light" as she calls it – by communing with people beyond the grave. She devises psychically wholesome diets. She makes health drinks from plants grown within Neolithic stone circles. Now and then she acts as a psychic midwife at rebirthing ceremonies. According to one report in a national newspaper, the Blairs were so influenced by her teachings that last year, on holiday in Mexico, they "stripped off to their swimming costumes for a rebirthing ceremony in which they screamed in a special hut as they smeared each other with mud from the jungle, together with melon and papaya, while ancient Mayan songs were chanted".

Fair enough, you might say. Which family, if the truth be told, has not at some point done a bit of holiday mud-smearing, screaming and chanting? The problem is (and this has been less widely reported) that what is a leisure activity for the Blairs has begun to take a grip on the Government as a whole, with highly disruptive effects.

David Blunkett, something of a negative-energy centre when it comes to alternative healing methods, has privately complained that, after her flower-therapy sessions, Cherie smells "like a blinkin' poodle parlour". In recent weeks, he has taken to humming "Who Let the Dogs Out?" when she walks into a room.

But it is the effect of channelling on other members of the Cabinet that is causing most concern. Robin Cook, whose second wife Gaynor likes to rebirth over breakfast every day, is rumoured to have suffered serious psychological damage after a session with Mrs Caplin. He'd hoped to make contact with some of his sporting heroes – Fred Archer, the Duke of Beaufort, Red Rum – but instead was harangued by the ghosts of the father and mother of modern socialism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, for betraying Clause Four, nationalisation, trades-union rights and the concept of common ownership of the means of production and exchange in order to keep New Labour in power.

A more enthusiastic channeller, Tessa Jowell, has been known to interrupt cabinet meetings by announcing: "Hang on, I think someone's trying to get through," while Lord "Derry" Irvine has begun taking a distillation of dandelion, wild strawberry leaf and thyme with his claret at lunch in the hope that it will clear his toxic blockages.

Less surprisingly, Michael Meacher has taken to inviting holistic therapists and crystal-gazers from Birmingham to one of his country retreats and credits them with locating his inner centre, which he had believed lost for ever. At a meeting of environment ministers in Brussels, he startled colleagues by insisting they hold hands and join him in a native American menstruation chant to lay a positive chi on their deliberations.

But it is the Deputy Prime Minister who has succumbed most spectacularly. After a traumatic rebirthing in the back of his car on the M1, John Prescott somehow became convinced that he is the reincarnation of the legendary 18th-century sumo wrestler Tanikaze. At the recent Labour Party conference, a security guard discovered him in the conference hall, clad only in a makeshift mawashi loincloth made out of a hotel towel, running about waving a clump of burning sage. He was "clearing the energy," he said.

At the insistence of Alastair Campbell the whole thing was hushed up, but Prescott, or "the mighty Kaze", as he prefers to be known, remains unrepentant. The fact remains that the energy was cleared at the conference, he has argued – and who could possibly disagree?