Cherie Blair,Tony Blair

London, May 18: For 33 years, David Attwood has kept silent about his relationship with the woman whom his family expected him to marry — his childhood sweetheart Cherie Booth.

However, Cherie Blair, as she is now, has revealed details of their relationship in her book, Cherie Blair: The Autobiography, in which Attwood’s name appears no fewer than 32 times.

Attwood, now a happily married solicitor living in Southport, near Cherie’s childhood home of Crosby, Merseyside, said he was taken aback by the volume of information she has made public, despite her previous insistence that her private life was off-limits.

“I haven’t read the book and I haven’t read the serialisation, so I’m not certain what’s been said,” Attwood said. “To be quite honest, I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about something that happened a long, long time ago.”

Attwood has always refused requests for interviews about his time with Cherie in the early 1970s.

She does not share his discretion, however, and reveals in her book that she cheated on him by sleeping with two other men at a time when both of their families believed they might marry.

While Attwood, 54, studied law in Liverpool, Cherie was seeing another law student, identified only as John, in London. She then made fools of both men by sleeping with Tony Blair after a Christmas party in 1975.

Asked if Cherie had contacted him to seek permission to use his name in the book, Attwood said: “I would rather not say.” But when told he was mentioned more than 30 times in the book, he was taken aback.

“Really?” he said. “It sounds like I’m the star of it.” Attwood found out he was being two-timed when one of Cherie’s other boyfriends answered the door when he paid her a surprise visit.

“Basically I was a coward and I didn’t have the heart to do what I had to do,” Cherie writes. “Then one evening, out of the blue David turned up on my doorstep at Abercorn Place (St John’s Wood). John answered with a shoe in his hand. Mine. He was one of those breed of men who enjoys cleaning shoes. And at that point David realised that was it.”

Attwood, a father of two, eventually forgave Cherie, and visited Downing Street with his wife Fiona during Toby Blair’s premiership.

Her relationship with her other boyfriend, John, ended in similar circumstances, when Tony Blair turned up on the doorstep one day. “John shouted at him to get lost, but Tony wasn’t budging,” wrote Cherie.

Cherie has also apologised to a judge after wrongly identifying him in the autobiography as a boyfriend on whom she cheated with Tony Blair.