Tony Blair's blurt on Radio 5 Live that he is "considering" his next job prompted speculation about the sacks of gold awaiting his departure from No 10. Given that Jim Naughtie got £300,000 for his Blair-Brown book, publishing sources estimate that the great helmsman could quite easily command a £1m advance, plus maybe half as much again in serial rights. Then there would be compensation for loss of ministerial office (a nice little earner under new Labour), plus severance for ceasing to be an MP. So his golden goodbye could reach £2m - before he begins drawing his £120,000 a year pension and four times that for a seat on the board of Oxford University plc. And the choice between the US lecture circuit or becoming the first elected president of the European Union would be so difficult.
Meanwhile, public service workers were told they could not stage a protest about creeping privatisation of the NHS at Labour's spring conference in Cardiff on 2 February. Reason: tight security round the appearance of the PM the next day. Plainly, his safety is more important than party democracy. Alas for Millbank paranoids, too many of the intending protesters are delegates with access to the hall, and the prohibition bid collapsed.
The Tory frontbencher Gary Streeter has told voters in his region that the Conservative Party associations "have got to start selecting fewer white, male barristers with 2.4 children". Well, now he has a safe seat, he has spoken up. Streeter is a white, male lawyer with two children. Maybe the .4 is his dog.
The Foreign Office may spend £300,000 a year on champagne in Paris ("one can't serve beer and sandwiches amid 200-year-old furniture"), but Sir Michael Jay, Jack Straw's permanent secretary, served only mineral water at a Whitehall lunch for diplomatic writers. Perhaps things will change when the head of the Design Council gives his office a make-over. Jay thinks classical furniture and the oils of bygone imperialists are too redolent of Cool Britannia's colonial past. The sculpture will be more contemporary, and, oh, yes, Jay would like more women and ethnic minorities in the FCO. As statues, perhaps.
John Hume, the ex-SDLP leader, has been asked by the Dublin publishers Gill & Macmillan to write his autobiography. It might prove a challenge. His memory is legendary (that's nothing special in lrish politics), but as a diarist he is not quite in the same class as Tony Benn.
Meanwhile, Arthur Scargill intends to use his non-retirement to complete his autobiography. It was said in the 1970s that he had completed the first three volumes, dealing with his pre-school days. The working title "I Was Right" has been firmed up to "I Was Absolutely Right".
Further particulars on the organisational skills of the late Sir Ray Powell, MP for Ogmore and one-time whip in charge of Labour's shadow cabinet election procedures. Sources now say that, in addition to votes already cast being amended with Tippex solution, new MPs seeking an office in the Commons were sometimes asked to fill in a blank proxy vote before they got their feet under a desk.
One government agency has already begun using the single currency. From next month, the Public Lending Rights agency, which gives authors twopence a time when their books are borrowed from the library, will pay British writers living abroad in euros. Incidentally, Shakespeare would have earned £3,279 in the latest pay year - little more than half the £6,000 that A A Milne would have scooped. So much for immortality.
Consternation as John Cryer MP admits to a role in the 1972 version of The Railway Children, but not, contrary to what I wrote last week, that of the naked infant son of Perks, the station porter. He should have kept stum; the story was doing wonders for his manly image. Still, I expect this will cost me a lunch.
Paul Routledge is chief political commentator for the Mirror
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