President Blair - a steal at £3.5 million. Unbeatable value for money

The papers are all full of the exciting news that Tony Blair, if he follows his manifest destiny and is inaugurated shortly as the first President of Europe, will earn about £3.5 million during his 30-month tenure of office. I wonder how this stately figure was arrived at.

The prevailing post-Thatcherite wisdom is that rewards are equivalent to one’s value in the open market. I’m sure it’s not only we socialists who feel a smidgen of doubt in this particular case. For all Mr Blair’s gifts and abilities, does the EU not think it could have had a perfectly serviceable President for rather less than three and a half mil? And I can’t imagine the salary was fixed to attract the right candidate. £3.5m is surely small change to Tony and Cherie these days, and it’s not exactly a secret that Blair wants this job so badly that he’d be quite happy to do it for nothing. After all, I’m pretty sure that he won’t have to put his hand in his own pocket at any time during those 30 months. Except for holidays, of course – whoops, I forgot, the Blairs tend not to pay for those either. So why the need to set the Presidential screw at this level?

It’s obviously a matter of status. One has to at least pretend to keep up with the Berlusconis. Like our former Deputy Prime Minister, one wants to be let it be known that one has one’s own personal Jag as well as the official one. Important people like to be rich, and vice versa. And, after all, that the EU likes to scatter other people’s money with a lavish hand is not exactly news.

What is clear, though, is that this sort of thing has nothing to do with market values. And it’s not confined to the public sector, either, though in the private sector it’s shareholders’ money rather than taxpayers’. Beyond a certain level, probably not unadjacent to the Government’s arbitrarily chosen £150,000, the connection between salary and market value becomes so exiguous as to be nugatory. That’s why I don’t care how highly they are taxed. And the next person to tell me that high salaries are justified by the market value of the services provided, rather than a mere badge of self-defined status, will get my pint upended over their head.