The new retirement is not all about rest and relaxation. It's all about re-direction.
from the AFP(....
Blair on course to become richest ex-British premier
LONDON -- Middle East envoy, adviser to a leading Swiss insurer and a blue-chip US investment bank, sought-after public speaker: Tony Blair has not dropped the pace since stepping down as British prime minister.
This week Zurich Financial Services announced that Blair would advise them on a range of issues, including developments and trends in international politics and climate change.
That came a few weeks after JPMorgan Chase said they had recruited the 54-year-old to be a part-time senior adviser on political and strategic issues.
Between times, he is spending a week to 10 days in Jerusalem working unpaid for the Mideast Quartet of the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia -- a job he was appointed to on the day he left office last June.
The list could get even longer. Blair has admitted he could see himself accepting a "handful" of similar posts: he has struck a deal for memoirs and launched a youth sports initiative; a faith foundation is in the pipeline.
And there is much talk of him becoming the first president of the European Union.
All told, Blair could be on course to become the richest ex-British premier in history -- although no figures have been officially confirmed.
Several media reports have estimated that his salaries from Zurich.
JPMorgan and one-off fees for speeches could see him earn more than 10 million pounds in less than year.
John Burton, Blair's former election agent, said his old friend was not spreading himself too thinly and was well-used to a heavy -- and varied -- workload.
"He's got that gift of being able to assimilate information pretty quickly," he told Agence France-Presse by telephone from his home in northeast England.
“I stayed at Downing Street two or three times and he took three red boxes to bed with him. It was non-stop. It's a tremendous load but he's well able to cope with it,” Burton said.
"He's a respected figure and he's an expert in some of these fields just through being prime minister," he said.
It is not just a one-man band though: Blair has about 12 full-time staff at the American Colony hotel in Jerusalem, plus another eight working out of his Saint James' Square offices in central London.
But not everyone is happy, particularly elements of the right-wing press who have castigated Blair's wife, Cherie, in the past for allegedly "cashing in" on her husband's position with lucrative public speaking tours.
"Has the man no shame?" lawmaker Norman Baker, from the second opposition Liberal Democrat party, was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail.
"It is a huge embarrassment for Britain to have a former prime minister hawking himself around with a big 'For Sale' sign around his neck," Baker said.
The Financial Times does not begrudge Blair the right to earn lots of money nor doubts his capacity to juggle a number of very different briefs.
Yet it questioned the wisdom of mixing business with global politics.
"Mr. Blair will no doubt be scrupulous in not mixing appeals for peace and compromise in meetings with Gulf leaders with appeals for contracts with JPMorgan," the influential business daily said in a recent editorial.
"But it is impossible completely to separate his identities as an international envoy and international salesman," it said.
Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics, dismissed such an argument.
"His position is transparent. It's all over the newspapers, everybody knows who he will be working for, there's no secrecy in any of this," he told Agence France-Presse.
Blair's Conservative Party predecessors Margaret Thatcher and John Major both went on to the international public speaking circuit after leaving Downing Street and wrote their memoirs, albeit with less fanfare, Travers added.
The former Labor Party leader's need for cash is easily explained.
He left office after 10 years in June last year, moving into a plush central London townhouse bought with a mortgage estimated at 3.5 million pounds, according to the media.
Travers said Blair's role for the Quartet "won't last forever" and "I'm sure he feels the need to stock-up on serious income and that's what he's doing."
On the EU presidential post, for which he has French President Nicolas Sarkozy's backing, the academic said Blair could be playing the long game: getting rich quick could be an "insurance policy" against not getting the job.
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