Londoners Diary: Being a PM can be a nice little earner

 
In the spotlight: former PM Tony Blair has a lucrative deal with the Saudis (Picture: AFP/Getty)
10 November 2014

Hats off to Tony Blair. The Londoner read with some interest that the former champion of a fairer equal society is being paid a cool £10,250 a week by the Saudis in return for access to his little black book — which must be a nice top-up to the £3,653 he’s still being paid every week by British taxpayers.

Some £75,000 pa of that comes from Blair’s prime ministerial pension, which is claimed by all former Prime Ministers, bar the ever spartan Gordon Brown. But they are also entitled to claim an additional £115,000 a year in public duty costs allowance to reimburse them for any public service work they continue to do each year — such as turning up to the Cenotaph yesterday, where Blair was solemnly bowing his head alongside the Queen and John Major. Yet despite the sums former PMs are allowed to claim, they are not required to publicly explain how the money is spent.

“MPs’ expenses have properly been put under the microscope, and that scrutiny should extend to the public duties allowance as well,” argued the Scottish Nationalist MP Pete Wishart two years ago but his cries have fallen on deaf ears. “David Cameron talks about transparency but, as someone who will benefit from this allowance, will he commit to shedding light on how this little-known allowance is being spent?”

In 2012 and 2013 Blair — estimated to be worth somewhere between an extravagant £100 million and a mere, modest £20 million — claimed the maximum amount of £115,000, more than Brown, Major and the late Lady Thatcher, none of whom regularly maxed out their expenses.

The Londoner called the Cabinet Office to see whether Blair was still drawing his government pocket money for 2014. They were still checking as we went to press.

Mrs Battleaxe puts her feet up rather than standing for Ukip

Rumours persist that Neil Hamilton is just a Ukip smokescreen, and that it is really his wife Christine whom Nigel Farage wants to recruit, so The Londoner thought it was time to put in a call.

“No, no, no, no,” said Christine, who changed her name by deed poll to Mrs British Battleaxe. “Nigel did ask both me and Neil in 2002, and I was approached again last summer. But I’ve grown up, I have put away childish things.”

Surely there’s nothing childish about Ukip. The Londoner caught Christine on the phone while she had her feet up, after an operation on one of them. “This is rather a dream, though,” said Christine. “My husband is waiting on me hand and foot. Running around, plumping cushions and making me cups of tea and coffee. I’m finding it terrifyingly easy to do nothing.” Take that, Godfrey Bloom.

Er, has anyone spotted my Oscar?

An Oscar is the ultimate accolade for an actor but for former child star Hayley Mills, double star of The Parent Trap, the golden statuette is just a thing of the past. Mills gave an interview in The Telegraph this weekend and explained that while she appreciated the Honorary Juvenile Oscar she received for Pollyanna in 1960, she doesn’t actually know where it is. “My Oscar would be my most treasured memorabilia if I still had it,” she explained, “but somebody stole it. It disappeared after I came home after working in California. I couldn’t find it and I’ve never seen it since. “It’s a mystery that, maybe, somebody will solve one day.”

Has she checked eBay?

Now for a new hunger game

A striking redhead with what appears to be an ankle monitor left Chiltern Firehouse on Sunday but it was not Lindsay Lohan. Instead Julianne Moore was at the Marylebone restaurant ahead of tonight’s premiere of the new Hunger Games film.

Striking: Julianne Moore (Picture: Rex)

The series is set to be turned into a live West End stage show. Considering the amount of blood spilt in the first book alone — it sees children kill each other for sport — The Londoner plans on sitting a few rows back.

Jones takes a stand on Chair

In January, Dasha Zhukova, the Russian gallery-owner best known for being Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend, caused controversy when a picture of her perching delicately on a chair shaped like a half-naked black woman was published on an online magazine.

The “artwork” was a pastiche of the British pop artist and sculptor Allen Jones’s Chair, re-imagined by Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, but in a recent interview with i-D magazine Jones revealed that it was not so much the suggested racism of Melgaard’s piece that shocked him but the lack of originality.

“The history of art is an artist paying homage to other artists, but usually you can see the new thought, and in this case I couldn’t,” said Jones.

“If it had been a black artist then I would have thought, ‘Oh I see, he wanted to claim the idea’, but it didn’t mean anything to me.”

Pythons won’t budge for £20m

How very refreshing. While some superstars never turn down a decent cheque for taking the stage late in life, Monty Python star Eric Idle says there’s no point always chasing the buck. Idle has revealed that the Python group turned down £20 million to take their show on a world tour recently — think the Rolling Stones of comedy. But, says Idle: “We’re all in our seventies, everybody has different things to do. When you get old — grumpy old men — you go, ‘I don’t care how much bloody money, I’m not going out, I’m staying home’.”

A double whammy from Polly Samson

We’re listening to Pink Floyd’s new album, The Endless River, this morning, the band’s first in two decades. It marks a collaboration with writer and poet Polly Samson, who provides the lyrics for one of the songs and has a new book, Kindness, coming out next year.

Her offering, Louder Than Words, “expresses, beautifully, I think, the way the three of us — me, Nick and Rick — have something when we play together,” says her husband Dave Gilmour.

Monty the penguin playing it straight

The Londoner was one of the millions moved by the John Lewis penguin advert, but as other chains attempt to replicate the Christmas magic we do wonder if they’re missing something. John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Burberry all celebrate the hetero-normative in their festive offerings but many have taken to social media to point out that gay people also celebrate the holiday.

Indeed, many Twitterati had hoped that Monty the Penguin’s mate in the John Lewis ad may have been another male, until its name was revealed as Mabel.

“You’d think in the year that gay marriage became legal our biggest shops might realise that not all families consist of a husband and a wife and two perfect children,” Spear’s magazine editor Josh Spero told us this morning. “Britain is a diverse country with families of all shapes, sizes, colours and genders. Next year it might be nice to see Monty the Penguin get Mark, not Mabel, as a Christmas companion.”

Or perhaps they could go over to John and Lewis’s for some mulled wine.

Now Nancy’s backing Sir Alex

He might be one of the greatest football managers of all time but since his departure from Manchester United we fear Sir Alex Ferguson may be feeling under-employed — he is often spotted watching his old team from the director’s box.

But help is at hand in the form of Nancy Dell’Olio. At a talk with journalist Bryony Gordon this weekend, the women discussed the similar problems facing Labour and Man United: their strong leaders had been replaced by weak successors, leading to Gordon suggesting Fergie is brought in. Dell’Olio — an Arsenal fan, by the way — replied: “Yes, this is his chance! We need a new leader of Labour …”

Sir Alex has long been a Labour supporter, and with the discontent over Ed Miliband, could now be time for a Boris-like coup?. Dell’Olio describes herself as a “lawyer, entrepreneur, author and TV personality”. She can add “employment adviser” now.

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