Why Blair Did It: The Emerging Consensus

Stephen Glover writes:

Many MPs now evidently regard politics as a path to self-enrichment.

Who can doubt that the Tory MP Derek Conway, who paid his two sons £83,000 for "employment" over seven years, is only one of the worst among many?

For most of us, £83,000 is an enormous sum.

It would appear that even if you are not an especially successful politician like Mr Conway, you can boost your family's fortunes by a clever manipulation of ever-increasing allowances and expenses.

In one fashion or another, many MPs are doing it.

But there is another figure who has made politics not so much a path to self-enrichment as a gateway to a vast fortune.

I am speaking of Tony Blair. No man has made as much money out of public office since Sir Robert Walpole in the 18th century when, as now, many people entered politics to get rich, or richer.

Unlike Mr Conway, Mr Blair has not broken any rules in lining his pockets. He has certainly not broken the law.

But I would say that as a moral exemplar, he is every bit as reprehensible, and I believe that at the centre of his activities there lie the seeds of corruption that potentially make Mr Conway's transgressions seem very small beer.

Since he left office last June, Mr Blair is estimated to have netted more than £10 million in payments.

There is the advance of £5 million on his memoirs. He has been signed up by the American bank J. P. Morgan at a salary of £2.5 million to do work that is not expected to be very onerous.

For £2 million a year he will act as an adviser to Zurich, a Swiss-based financial multi-national.

Then there are untold hundreds of thousands of pounds to be made by delivering speeches to credulous U.S. businessmen, and others.

I am excluding Cherie Blair's ample prospective piggy bank from these calculations.

I hope I am moved neither by jealousy nor a sense of puritanism, but the speed and scale of these transactions appear to me to be unseemly.

Most of us expect that former prime ministers should be able to obtain the best sum they can for their memoirs, and even to make paid-for speeches, to add to a relatively modest pension entitlement of £64,000 a year.

But Mr Blair is going much further, and at a much faster lick, than any of his predecessors.

He is said - though the figure is so stupendous one can hardly believe it - to have made a speech in China for £500,000.

The "jobs" with J. P. Morgan and Zurich do not reflect his financial acumen - for all his great political gifts, he is virtually financially illiterate - and so he is being rewarded for providing access to contacts he made as prime minister.

Perhaps you don't mind. Perhaps you think he should fill his pockets with gold as fast as he can.

To me, his behaviour seems greedy, though it should come as no surprise that this supposed socialist (what a joke!) should be so in love with money.

He was always infatuated with billionaires, and his "freebie" holidays in the villas of the super-rich became legendary.

Is there potential corruption in what I have described?

No, there is greed and grotesque behaviour, though we should note that the role at Zurich was lined up by Lord Leitch, a former chairman of the company, who was made a Labour life peer in 2004. Let's hope it was not pay-back time.

All this is bad enough, but there is a further consideration of an even more serious nature.

I will not accuse Mr Blair of corruption on an epic scale, but nor is it possible to exculpate him.

The money any modern British prime minister earns on retirement will come in large measure from the U.S. - from book sales, speeches and "jobs" at banks.

So, it has proved with Tony Blair. If we include the advance for his memoirs, which will sell many more copies in the much bigger American market than here, more than half of his income so far can be attributed to the U.S.

Mr Blair was America's limpet ally before and during the Iraq war. I am not suggesting he was driven at that time by a wish to suck up to the U.S. so he could make as much money as possible there when he stood down as prime minister.

There were doubtless many imperatives. But we have only to ask how much money former President Jacques Chirac of France - who opposed the war - could make in the U.S. to understand the point.

Or, to put it the other way around, if Tony Blair had not stood shoulder to shoulder with George Bush, would he be such a hot property in the U.S.? Of course not.

Any British prime minister - and this was certainly true of Mr Blair - knows the foreign policy he espouses, and the degree to which it is deemed pro-American, could largely determine his retirement income.

The worry is all the greater in the case of Mr Blair because of the enormous liabilities which he built up, and which he could not conceivably have paid off without the assurance of a huge income that would have to be largely generated in the U.S.

As a result of buying a lavish town house in London in 2004, and a mews house behind it last year, he had by the time he stood down seven months ago racked up a mortgage of more than £4 million - or 25 times his prime ministerial salary.

He needed mega bucks to service this debt, and he would have had to convince those who were lending him so much money that he had set up the means of doing so.

Many people are understandably worried by the disclosures concerning Derek Conway, and others like him.

It is obviously outrageous that MPs should pay members of their families with public money for work they have not done.

There must be far greater transparency in MPs' allowances. I am not at all sure they should be allowed to employ their spouses, even when the taxpayer is getting good value for money.

Such arrangements can never be entirely open.

But whatever misgivings I have on this score are far eclipsed by those I have in the case of Mr Blair, and his successors.

His manic greed is depressing enough - what an appalling example it gives to the young and idealistic! - but the thought that the foreign policy of this country might have been even partly affected by his future financial needs is deeply troubling.

Let us look at the allowances and expenses of MPs, and urge the Government and Opposition to see to it that these abuses are ended.

But let us also consider how prime ministers, and leading Cabinet ministers, should be permitted to make their money after they have stepped down.

There is scope for corruption, by the side of which Mr Conway looks like a small-time chancer.

Be assured that I write largely as a pro-American. But the next time we team up with Uncle Sam on a perilous international adventure, we want to be sure the Government is acting with only this country's best interests in mind.

As I look at Tony Blair lining his pockets at a preposterous rate, I do not believe we can be certain that this was the case when he was prime minister.