Giving For Gold

‘HERE’S your chance to back the Government’s drive towards securing the right to host the 2012 London Olympics and get the chance to win your very own gold medal!

‘Do I hear £200,000..?’

And it gets even better when you hear that you need not train, inject your stomach with performance-enhancing drugs or even own a pair of shorts to enter.

To be considered for Olympic glory, simply put a donation in a brown paper envelope and sent it to ‘T Blair, Gold Fund’ by 2012.

The letter containing the fittest offer that hasn’t been intercepted, lost or stolen by Royal Mail workers will win the day.

As the Guardian reports on its front page, biotechnology entrepreneur Paul Drayson sent £100,000 to Tony’s Labour party while bidding for a £32m contract to supply the Department of Health with smallpox vaccine – and he won the deal.

Of course that was just coincidence. The National Audit Office and the Commons’ Science And Technology Committee looked into the matter and cleared all parties of fixing the contract.

But a mere two years after that deal, the Independent delivers the latest news that Drayson gave the Labour party a further £505,000 just after he was made a life peer.

Once more the level of coincidence is astonishing.

And this as Drayson takes his seat in the Lords ‘as a champion of the kind of bioscientific enterprise Tony Blair is eager to foster in Britain’ (Guardian).

So if you want to be a winner at Tony’s Olympics in 2012, don’t hang about. Get earning. And get donating.’

Posted: 25th, August 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink