THE TELEGRAPH: A staff of 130, turnover in the tens of millions: Tony Blair has created enormous wealth, but nobody knows quite how.
Tony Blair was merely a prime minister when he made his last major speech at the Trimdon Labour Club in 2007. After being burdened with the inconvenience of running the country for 10 years, he could not stop grinning as he announced that he was quitting not only Downing Street, but Parliament itself, freeing him from the constraints of public service.
On Tuesday, as Mr Blair returned to Trimdon to endorse Gordon Brown, his former constituents got their first close-up view of just how much better life had become for “our Tony” since he began his “journey” (as he would say) into the private sector.
With skin burnished to a dark ochre by unbroken exposure to the world’s sunniest climes and worry lines long faded away, Mr Blair made those around him look anaemic. Gone were the “blokeish” glottal stops in his speech that used to remind us that he was a “pretty straight sort of guy”, replaced by a mid-Atlantic twang that was far more user-friendly to his fee-paying audiences around the world.
But it was not Mr Blair’s physical appearance, nor even his glowing tribute to his sometime friend Mr Brown, that provided the greatest surprise of his visit to Sedgefield. It was the discovery that Mr Blair now employed 130 people in his ever-expanding business and charity empire, with the wage bill for “Blair Incorporated” thought to be £10 million to £20 million.
Incredible as it may seem, it means that all previous estimates of Mr Blair’s personal wealth — usually put at £20 million since he left office — appear to have been more than a little on the conservative side.
Sources close to Mr Blair say his earnings are “several multiples” of the figures that have been quoted in the past, suggesting that £50 million or even £60 million would be closer to the mark, although his spokesman described such a suggestion as “simply ludicrous”.
We will never know the truth, of course, because Mr Blair has set up a mind-boggling web of companies through which he can channel his earnings without having to declare publicly all of his income. The only two Blair companies that filed accounts had a combined income of £11.7 million in 2008-09.
However, a conversation Mr Blair had this week with his former agent, John Burton, provided a telling glimpse of what lay behind his veil of secrecy. >>> Gordon Rayner | Saturday, April 03, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: Tony Blair ‘has blighted Buckinghamshire village’ >>> Jon Swaine | Saturday, April 03, 2010
