The Gravy Train

I thought I was listening to exerts from 'The Joy of Sex' over the weekend when people started talking of 'Fiscal Stimulus' and 'Quantitative Easing' as forms of relief. Sadly it was much the same tosh rolled out by desperate people as we hurtle toward Banana Republic status.

It's good to catch up with the 'Snouts in the trough' crews who seem to make money out our votes. First up is the new business phenomenon, Tony Blair Global Enterprises Inc. Happy Tony, away from the glare of the spotlight of responsibility, has been busying himself with the serious business of making vast amounts of money. You didn't think that envoy thing in the Middle East would get in the way of more serious matters, did you? Besides, in these trouble times, thanks to his old enemy Brown, a man has to get what he can take.

You see, it's not possible to live on the taxpayer funded £63,468 a year to be fair, or to make anything worthwhile out of the £84,000 allowance he still has to run a private office - I mean his son couldn't do any research for that kind of peanuts. No, Tony has started up Tony Blair Associates which will 'allow him to provide, in partnerships with others, strategic advice on a commercial and pro-bono basis, on political and economic trends and governmental reforms' according to its website.

He should be good at the trends bit as he has plenty of knowledge how graphs point upwards but isn't so good at the downward pointing ones - that's where a partnership with Brown may help.

On The Make

Tony is a serious hitter when it comes to making money - he is sitting on a sweet advance from his publisher of around £4.5m for his memoirs which I should imagine will be as riveting and daft as Alistair Campbell's, the real leader during his terms in office, but he is also one of the City real fat cats as he receives £2.5m per annum for his role as part-time adviser to JP Morgan - and they can really afford that due to the bail out money in circulation, thanks to the stupidity of people like Tony - it's what is known as an 'Economic Cycle' in the Blair household. But he also gets £2m per annum for another part-time adviser role with Zurich Financial Services which is one of the nicest gestures of alms you could possibly get unless they want advice on insuring dodgy mortgages from ex-con men.

Such trifling hand outs to settle old favours, possibly, is not enough for a man of his calibre - after all the country and indeed, the world, owe him. So Tony is on the lucrative after dinner speech circuit along with Les Dennis and others, but 'Big' Tony is a crowd puller and he earned a nice £240,000 for 90 minutes worth of bull to hungover mobile telecom executives in Barcelona recently.

The really best part is that a spokesman claimed that Blair Associates allowed him to best organise his time so that he could devote more time to his core activities in the Middle East. As we saw in the recent crisis there, Tony was at the forefront of handling the situation and his Blair Associates hologram was advising JP Morgan, Zurich Financials and the drunken crew in Barcelona.

The Gravy Train

If he gets short of cash and things to occupy his time outside his 'core activities', Tony Blair could always become an MEP. In a recent report these guys can clock up as much as £1m in just 5 years if they work the system well enough. I would love to see the report extended to EC Commissioners and find out the scams they get into outside of back-scratching on £80m yachts for Russian Oligarchs but we will have to wait for that.

These lucky fellows can play the expenses game to their advantage according to a confidential report by Robert Galvin, the head of internal audit at the European Parliament. Some of the scams are worthy of seasoned fraudsters who are subject to police scrutiny and the law but what goes in in Strasbourg, stays in Strasbourg, as they say I'm sure. Some of the best scams are:

• Payments paid to assistants who were not accredited and to companies whose accounts show no activities
• End of year bonuses of up to 19.5 times monthly salary to assistants in order to use up their full annual allowance
• Payments, supposedly for secretarial work, were made to a creche whose manager happened to be a local politician from the MEP's political party
• Payments were made direct into the accounts of national political parties
• Some assistants doubled their money from outgoing MEPs at the same time as receiving salaries from incoming ones
• One MEP claimed to have paid the full £182k allowance to one person, suspected of being a relative

It's a pretty juicy business as these guys can take up to £257 per day in subsistence also, plus they can claim up to £217,800 in expenses by claiming their home was their office - Jacqui Smith should really hurry on down. Finally, as usual, MEPs have a final salary pension scheme which is even more generous than the MP scam, I mean, scheme whose cash value is around £350k over the a full parliamentary term. The best part is that we are all paying for this.

In case you don't believe anyone is scamming us, Conservative MEP, the oddly named Den Dover which sounds like a name from a Carry On film, was forced to pay back around £500k as he had inadvertently been paying his EU allowances to his family firm. A slight oversight which did not attract the attention of the law, of course.

I feel sorry for Derek Conway, in this context, he's just a second rate, cheap scammer compared to the real professionals.

Good News

It's not all bad news - last night Britain was very successful at the Oscars, with 'Slumdog Millionaire', a feel-good British film, sweeping up 8 Oscars while Kate Winslet won an Oscar for Best Actress. Way to go the Brits.

For Gordon Brown and Co. it's worth pointing out that Slumdog was made on a budget of just £10m and is set to be a real winner for this country. It proves, you don't have pile money down a drain or to rich bankers to fund talent and find success.