May 2009 22

Goldmember0

The blizzard of scandals at Westminster has reminded me of an old story with a European edge, still bobbing around in the political water.

While penning the Bumper Book of Government Waste 2008, we discovered that year on year Mr Blair’s official collection of expensive watches kept increasing. In 2003 alone, Downing Street retained 14 watches, almost all state gifts from Mr Berlusconi. Another three followed in 2004 from the Italian Government. The Prime Minister’s office held on to them as a state asset into which he could dip his wrist.

It did still appear to be an almost octopoidal state of affairs, so today when (if?) I get a quiet moment I shall be looking again at the more recent Donated Asset Reserves to figure out where these watches went. A retiring minister has the right to keep gifts under a certain value (£140), and to buy gifts at cost difference above that estimate: did Blair splash out on retirement, buy a bag of watches and make two grand in one swoop? I trust he had more sense.

It may seem a trivial issue. But it is also intriguing that journalists reported last year how Croatia’s Prime Minister had still to explain how he ended up with a large collection of luxury wrist watches assessed to be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

I make no connection between the two cases, but it does invite onlookers to commend the British system for providing a firewall against state bribery. Yet reform is still needed. The side is let down massively by the politicians and their press officers who reveal the gifts but not how they are used, leaving us to discover from insiders how Mrs Blair had revealed she had been wearing Berlusconi-gifted jewellery because she briefly lost it on a visit to a Liverpool school. Transparency in such matters is everything.

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Lee is a Research Fellow at the TPA. Co-author of the hit Bumper Books of Government Waste, he is an extensively published EU expert and front bench adviser.