African Chief Tony Blair’s £1million Farewell Tour

FROM Sedgefield to Paris, Iraq to Libya and the Vatican to Brussels, Tony Blair’s farewell tour is turning the outgoing PM into a latter day Phileas Fogg. (Pic: Beau Bo D’Or)

However, while the messianic one soaks up the adulation and racks up the air miles, criticism back home is growing over the huge cost of his globetrotting adventure.

According to the Conservatives, the bill, which will be met by us, the humble taxpayers, has now reached the £1million mark and Shadow Cabinet Minister Chris Grayling is not a happy little Tory.

He tells us: “Tony Blair’s farewell tour is nothing short of a self-indulgent waste of taxpayers’ money. This tour is clearly going to set the taxpayer back more than £1million. At a time when frontline jobs are being axed in the NHS, the Government-should stop spending time on this Vanity Tour and focus on the real issues facing the country today.”

On his recent jaunt to Washington, reports suggest that joining Blair and his team on the military aircraft were the novelist Martin Amis and a television documentary crew.

This week, the Blairwell tour hits Africa, although trouble spots such as Darfur and Zimbabwe have been neatly sidestepped, with the cavalcade instead calling in on the likes of Libya and Sierra Leone.

During his visit to the latter yesterday, Blair was made an honorary paramount chief in the village of Mahera, a title which allows him to represent 70,000 villagers.

However, his spokesman joked that the PM “can’t raise taxes or make people go into the fields as forced labour”.

Nor send them off to be killed in an illegal war.

Anorak

Posted: 31st, May 2007 | In: Uncategorized Comments (6) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink