Split personality

This is an obsolete name for what was later called MPD (multiple personality disorder), which in turn has now been re-named DID (dissociative identity disorder), in which a patient may appear to have a number of different personas each with his or her own behaviour patterns.

A recent TV documentary, Being Pamela, examined what may be a case of this, and the perceptive and witty Guardian writer Catherine Bennett in her column last week suggested that such a disorder might explain Cherie Blair’s seemingly inconsistent conduct:

One day, she might appear in the character of a devout young mother, peering shyly from a giant mantilla as she explains the importance of the Virgin Mary…..
…In an instant, she might switch to a different persona, a bleating New Age devotee of homeopathy, crystals and mud-covered rebirthing...
Then again into a highly toxic property developer, determined that nothing will stand between her and a brace of luxury flats, until, in another shift of persona...
...she forgets both flats and financial adviser and morphs into an eBay-addicted shopoholic with a fondness for brazen sexual innuendo, whose favourite programme, Supermarket Sweep, would be anathema to Mrs Blair in the most rational of her guises…
…as the brilliant human rights lawyer and hammer of sexist discrimination: Cherie Booth QC.

(The remainder of the article Is there more than one Cherie Blair? suggests a different diagnosis of her case.)