There is a bit of a buzz about
the Blairs at the moment, with the Daily Mail printing a series of articles
about the reviled couple’s money-making enterprises post Number Ten. It’s not comfortable reading. There’s
the government pension, of course, enough in itself for the average person to
feel they’d hit the jackpot. But that’s peanuts compared to the suspiciously
astute property deals, the huge fees for private speaking, seats on managing
boards and ludicrous but
well-remunerated roles such as ‘Middle East Peace Envoy’ which paid him handsomely
without there ever being any delivery of the promised peace.
Yes, it’s the Daily Mail –
hardly friends of Blair – but it’s not the person it’s the principle; how do
otherwise average achievers reach exalted positions? It’s like a re-imagined
version of the Peter Principle, whereby dullards reach and remain in jobs at
which they are incompetent. The phrase ‘promoted out of trouble’ has long been
used to describe the inexplicable rise of the clumsy, the inept and the
downright embarrassing who, on screwing up a position are promoted rather than
being fired. But for most people it tends to stop there: The boss’s son is
given a cushy back seat job on higher pay but out of sight. The high-flying
fuck up is gently placed on a path to a lucrative pension; no heavy lifting
involved.
But every other day the
newspapers seem to have stories about people being sacked from ridiculously
well-paid jobs for levels of incompetence that beggar belief. And then being paid
hefty sums to stop them from telling tales to honour pre-engagement ‘early
release’ clauses. Some people manage to go from being sacked from one high-profile
job after another, apparently picking up their multiple-millions each time; enough
for an average person to retire to the sun many times over. And they seem to do
this with not one shred of shame or acceptance of blame. How many of us have musingly
volunteered to take on one such job, fuck up and then disappear with a suitcase
full of money?
The top of society is littered
with grandiose failures; the men who spent £11billion on a computer system for
the NHS, which never worked. The arms procurement programmes which also cost billions
but likewise never get delivered. Massive, vainglorious reorganisations of
government departments, disrupting lives, costing millions, but never being
completed because administrations change. Bankers who bow out having bankrupted
their companies in the pursuit of ‘shareholder confidence’. And in their wake,
a trail of lawyers, accountants and asset-stripping parasites, all getting rich
from ineptitude, while lowlier clients lose their livelihood.
How did I get here? Fuck knows.
Ambitious parents used to tell
their children to set goals and work to achieve them. To decide what they
wanted to do in life then work hard to become the very best they could. Have a game
plan, keep your nose clean and keep on plugging away, son, you’ll get to the
top if you deserve it and do the right thing. But work no longer pays that way,
it seems. A conscientious parent should consider imbuing in their offspring
that in fact it is crime which pays, ideally very public crime, with misuse of
office and misappropriation of funds being the very pinnacle of success. In
Boys From the Black Stuff, Yosser went round saying “Gizza job, I can do that!”
Today he’d be saying “Ah go on, mister, give us the sack, eh?”
