The Great and The Good
While Britain’s overstretched servicewomen and men swelter in the desert heat for meagre pay and their families are forced to live in officially-sanctioned squalor, everywhere you look politicians and civil servants are enriching themselves at the British public’s expense.
Here’s what Sir John Bourn, the virtually unsackable – appointed for life, much like a Supreme Court judge in the US, he or she can be removed only by a joint vote of the House of Commons and House of Lords – Auditor General of the Uk’s National Audit Office, the man who is supposed to stop government waste and fraud, helped himself to in expenses from tne taxpayers’ hard-earned cash:
- 175 lunches and dinners since 2004 with permanent secretaries, directors of big accounting companies and defence contractors at the Ritz, Savoy, Dorchester, Brown’s Hotel, the Goring Hotel, Cipriani, Bibendum, Wiltons, Mirabelle and The Square. The bills, nearly all for two people, vary from £80 to £301. Many of the bills came to between £150 and £220. One bill for four people – two from the NAO – at Wiltons was £500. In the past six months, he has spent £1,651.56 on meals.
- Entertaining by large defence contractors and accounting firms included a visit to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on July 8, paid for BAE Systems, the company caught in a corruption investigation over a Tanzanian defence order. Sir John has refused to release an NAO document on BAE’s biggest and most controversial defence order, the Al Yamamah defence deal with Saudi Arabia.
- Sir John went for a dinner at the Savoy hosted by the Society of British Aerospace Companies on September 6; attended a polo match on July 29 funded by IT contractor EDS, which has multimillion-pound government contracts; visited the opera at Garsington on July 4 paid for by GSL, a company promoting public finance initiatives, scrutinised by the NAO; attended a reception and opera recital at Middle Temple Hall with Lady Bourn on June 6, paid for by Reliance Security Group, which has PFI contracts with local government and the police.
- Sir John and Lady Bourn took foreign trips with first class air travel to San Francisco, Venice, Lisbon, Brazil, South Africa, the Bahamas and Budapest. Their air fares and taxi fares ranged from £15,997 to Brazil and £14,518 to South Africa, to £2,238 to Budapest and £1,718 to Venice.
- Lady Bourn did not accompany him on his latest trips, to Moldova on September 28 and to Khazakstan. The air fares were £1,117.50 and £2,107.20 respectively. Over the past six months, Sir John has spent £16,998 of taxpayers’ money on mainly first class travel for himself and his wife.
But.. but Sir John and Lady Bourn had had a social position to maintain!
So why has Sir John had such a blind spot? The reason, according to those who know him well, is pride and a determination not to be beholden to anyone, however grand.
“If he was taken to lunch at the Ritz by someone from a big company, he would insist on reciprocating at the same level. If he met a permanent secretary for lunch, he would take them in turn to suitable restaurant, say the Goring or Wiltons.”
Whether Sir John was entertaining a business director, fellow Whitehall mandarin or journalist – including from the Guardian – he would always insist that the NAO made a reciprocal arrangement.
When Sir John is abroad and representing Britain at conferences or signing agreements, earning the NAO £4m a year to advise foreign governments, he insists on a similar style.
Oh, heaven forbid a mandarin should ever lose face.
Since London’s become the world capital of dirty money, corrupt oligarchs. dodgy arms dealers and blinged-up billionaires, who’ve now joined the exiled dictators and corrupt corporate CEOs as perfectly acceptable additions to the most rarefied circles of top civil servants and government ministers, it’s been getting harder and harder for the socially ambitious public servant to keep up. The bar keeps getting raised ever higher – you have a car and driver, he has a Maibach and a driver and a bodyguard . You have a chichi London pied a terre in Chelsea – but he has a mansion in Bishops’s Avenue. It never ends.
Blair is said to be buying himself and Cherie a Christopher Wren-designed country pile in Wiltshire (see above) that’s finally big enough and posh enough as to befit their massively inflated egos.
Buying it with what, one asks? A relatively modest new-build Barratt home in Dulwich was good enough for Thatcher on her retirement and she was no slouch in the personal enrichment stakes. Where’s the money for this new Blair landed estate coming from? For someone who’s never had a job that wasn’t in some way taxpayer-subsidised, the newly-retired Blair, so recently worried about he’d pay his mortgage, suddenly seems to be doing quite well.
No doubt the taxpayers, as they do with the Blair’s house in Connaught Square, will be picking up the bill for police security on his new country estate. I suspect that bill will make Sir John and Lady Bourn’s expenses look a mere bagatelle in comparison. The fact that he is in potential physical danger only as a result of his own actions is not a factor. We must pay to protect his and Cheries’ sense of entitlement and grandeur.
Our elected and appointed public servants see themselves not as public servants, but as an elite social group set apart from the rest of us poor schmucks. This arms race in greed and corruption will only accelerate while we allow them to think that and act as trhough that’s so.
