When Politicians' Words Are Far From Cheap
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26 December, 2007 08:27
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In recent years several of Britain's political leaders have added to their already-substantial parliamentary pensions by joining the American lecture circuit or making lucrative chat show appearances. Lady Thatcher probably pave the way on the big bucks prattle parade when she demanded a reputed $400,000 for an address to a select and influential Washington dinner party. And that ever enthusiastic self-publicist Cherie Blair, though not a politico as such, was quick to spot the opportunity of the fame that had rubbed off on her during Tony's ten year tenure of No10 Downing Street.
She demanded almost as much as the Iron Lady for dinner or luncheon guest appearances in the US... often turning these into book signing sessions as well, thus not only adding cream to the jam on the buttered scone but sprinkling it liberally and lucratively with sugar.
Before fading UK politicians became the idols of the US mink and manure circuit they had to make do with what extra cash they could squeeze from publishers in advances for their autobiographies or edited diaries - only a few of which made the top ten in the weekly book sales listing and even fewer of which recouped for the publishers the sort of dosh they had doled out.
(In fact, years ago, a senior editor at Weidenfeld & Nicholson - then the crËme de la crËme of the politico-biography industry - told Atlas that most of these works were regarded as a sort of bookselling supermarket's "loss leaders", stimulating public interest and gaining kudos for the publishers but boring the reader to distraction.)
One wonders where these party leaders find the time to write their memoirs or keep such apparently detailed diaries as they shuffle from shadow cabinet posts to cabinet posts and eventually to the hot-seat - or in Cherie Blair's case from high profile court appearances to life-style guru and the dubious purchase of flats. She is her own woman and controls her own purse strings, and as far as the sniffer dogs of Britain's popular tabloid press have been able to find out she hasn't contributed a penny (or should that be a dime?) to paying the massive mortgage which the Blairs took on when in 2004 they acquired a house on London's fashionable Connaught Square for £3.65 million. This they had hoped to let for a high rental while they occupied their rent-free home at No 10 ...but they failed to find a tenant and the bills mounted up.
But those particular worries should soon be behind them as Tony gears up for another lucrative speaking trip that should earn him £300,000 for three speeches in Canada and the US - or $200,000 a time.
As one political observer put it this week: "Six months after stepping down as Prime Minister, Mr Blair's diary is evolving into a monthly pattern of three week's diplomacy and one week on the international lecture circuit where his standard fee is $200,000."
It might be a tempting prospect, too, for You Know Who - rightly renowned for his ability to chunter on...and on...and on. The problem is that there wouldn't be many takers. On the other hand, there might just be a market among those who would be delighted to pay him NOT to address them...
Three cheers for Pooh. For who? For Pooh...
A school board in Northen California has agreed to pay $95,000 in lawyers' fees to five families who sued the school over its dress code after a pupil was disciplined for wearing Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon character socks.
Sounds like another defeat for the Jobsworths...
Not quite a floe boat to China?
More than a century ago, the Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen formulated the theory of transpolar drift when he discovered a ship frozen in an ice floe in south west Greenland and identified it as a vessel that had disappeared off the coast of New Siberia three years previously. He set out to prove his theory in 1893 on board the "Fram", a ship with a specially thickened and strengthened hull designed to resist the pressure of the ice and three years later had crossed the artic on what has been described as "a frozen conveyor belt."
And for the past 15 months a twin-masted schooner "Tara" with a crew of scientists and engineers has sat high and dry on the ice pack traveling farther north than any ship before her to a position less than 100 miles from the North Pole. The immobile schooner's traverse of the ice has been partly a re-creation of Nansen's epic voyage, partly a serious scientific expedition...and partly just an old-fashioned adventure.
This week, 15 months and several thousand miles since she first wedged herself into the pack ice north of Russia, "Tara" was approaching the far side of the Arctic ice sheet and is soon to be spat out into the Fram Strait between Greenland an Norway. In fact the "conveyor belt" appears to have accelerated since Nansen's day - because the ice pack is receding as a result of global warming. By September this year the point at which "Tara" was wedged into the ice a year previously was 280 miles closed to the pole and scientists now predict that the Arctic ice pack could disappear entirely within the next 15 years.
It's a dog's life...
This year's annual World Pie Eating Championships in Wigan bit the dust last week when a dog ate all the pies. Former champion Dave Willikams was keeping the pies in his fridge before the event, but forgot to shut the door properly and his dog Charlie, a Bichon frise took advantage of his owner's lapse...
Billy the parrot has the last laugh!
Some years back one of Britain's rail network franchisees suggested that certain compartments of its trains should be set aside as "mobile free zones" in which - on pain of a fine - passengers would be barred from making or taking calls on their mobile telephones.
It was probably just a PR gimmick and never intended to be implemented; but Atlas, who at the time was a daily commuter between Salisbury and London and came to hate the incoming ringing of the mobiles of fellow passengers as much as he did the one-sided conversations that ensued, welcomed the idea.
(It is, coincidentally, a concept that could - but won't! - be explored by some of our better restaurants and bistros. All that buzzing and ‘semi-silent' shouting can't be good for the digestion.)
Although segregated mobiles would not have helped Huddersfield bus driver Stuart McNae, many who abhor the intrusiveness of these hand-held gadgets will sympathise with the 54-year-old who has had to change his mobile ring tone five times in the past four months - because his pet parrot enjoys playing practical jokes.
When its owner is out of the room, the blue-fronted Amazon parrot imitates the sound of an incoming call...and then "laughs like crazy" when McNae hurries into the room to take the call.
"It was amusing at first, but it has begun to get on my nerves," McNae admits in what may be one of the understatements of the year.
The unkindest cut of all
Political correctness...or just another skirmish in the battle of the sexes? Whatever the motivation behind the protests of the women soldiers of that oxymoronic army, the 2,400-strong Nordic Battlegroup - the force is looking distinctly shame-faced. And the reason for the supposedly crack north-European rapid-reaction force's embarrassment? The heraldic lion which stood proudly above the unit's motto Ad omnia paratus (Prepared for anything, anywhere) has been digitally emasculated and, though still technically rampant is no longer so in THAT sense...
The change was implemented when a group of Swedish women soldiers protested that they could not identify with such an ostentatiously male lion on their army crest, and lodged a complaint of sex discrimination with the European Court of Justice. The battle group's decision to accede to the feminist demands was damned by Vladimir Sagerlund, the heraldic expert who designed the crest.
"A heraldic lion is a powerful and stately figure with its genitalia intact and I cannot approve the edited image," he told reporters. "The army lacks knowledge about heraldry. Coats of arms containing lions without genitalia were given to those who betrayed the Crown."
Christian Braunstein, of the Swedish Army's Tradition Commission was more sanguine: "We were forced to cut the lion's willy off with the aid of a computers," he said.
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