Friday 4 July 2014

After Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, Tony Blair is now advising El-Sisi of Egypt

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After advising Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, the company promoting the hugely controversial projected open-cast gold mine project in Transylvania, Tony Blair is now advising General El-Sisi of Egypt, who has executed 2,500 opponents.

Actually, on balance, much as I am a great environmentalist and hate the thought of the changes it will necessitate to the landscape, I think I support the gold mine in Rosia Montana. Certainly I get very cross with some bad arguments used against it, for example by people who bang on about the cyanide. Cyanide is used everywhere in the world in open-cast gold mining. I also think General El-Sisi needs advice badly. But the impression one gets is that Tony Blair is doing these things to add to his fine collection of old English banknotes and this is not what England expects from her former Prime Ministers. 

James Callaghan, like Cincinnatus, retired to his farm, Harold Macmillan to Highgrove and Macmillan & Co, Lord Home became the Foreign Secretary who took Britain into the E.E.C., Edward Heath sulked on the back benches and in Salisbury cathedral close but none of them used their former position to make money, except from book royalties (royalties in Edward Heath's case for a book he never wrote).

At least Mr. Blair has not accepted a seat on the board of Gazprom.

An earlier leader of the Labour Party, the pacifist George Lansbury, departed from the job in floods of tears at the 1935 party conference, after Ernest Bevin famously accused him of 
"hawking his conscience around from body to body."
The suspicion must be that Tony Blair is hawking not his conscience but his advisory services from body to body and some pretty odd bodies. Or was he approached by General El-Sisi and Rosia Montana Gold Corporation?

Actually, much more than the unworldly Lansbury, Mr. Blair reminds me of Disraeli in his twenties, on a trip to Albania where he stayed with Ali Pasha, expressing his
"delight in being made much of by a man who is daily decapitating half the country".

1 comment:

  1. I wonder what motivates the man. Is it really the "banknotes"? He has enough of them already! Some say it's narcissism, but wouldn't a narcissist be concerned about how history will judge him? It's baffling.

    Joël

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