No recession in Whitehall
Janet Boateng's views were once too extreme even for loony-left Lambeth Council, says Geoffrey Levy in the Daily Mail. She was so militant, as one critic put it, "she made Red Ken Livingstone look like Ronald Reagan".
Not any longer. Now she's at the heart of the New Labour establishment, living in a lovely house in Cape Town with her husband, Paul Boateng, our High Commissioner in South Africa. This week it emerged that some of her domestic staff have accused her of bullying, an ironic reversal for a woman who used to be in a permament state of outrage over how black people were treated.
What interests me, however, is the world the Boatengs live in. When John Major visited the High Commissioner's house and gazed from the elegant drawing room at the tiered lawns overlooking Table Mountain, he was overwhelmed by its opulence. "I've learned a lot in the last few hours," he said. "For example, that the British High Commissioner lives in unimaginable luxury. And we pay for it."
Should we really still be pampering our Foreign Office mandarins like this? Of course not. Whether or not she bullies her staff, the real scandal is why she's allowed so many (26 at one count, says Levy, including five gardeners.) But there's no recession in Whitehall. If there were, as Boris Johnson says in The Daily Telegraph, the Government wouldn't still be spending £800m on advertising public-sector appointments when they could quite easily be displayed online.
And perhaps Liam Byrne, another Gordon Brown lackey, might show a touch more humility. Byrne, a jumped-up Labour MP who's now been made the 'Cabinet Enforcer', whatever that means, has written an 11-page memo to civil servants modestly entitled 'Working With Liam Byrne'. In it, this £100,000-a-year part-timer (who last year drew the second highest Commons expenses of £178,116) says he requires a cappuccino the instant he arrives, hot soup at 12.30, an espresso at 3pm and his papers laid out exactly according to his orders.
Our Government may have landed us in the direst of straits, but you wouldn't think so from the behaviour of our ministers and mandarins, who carry on as if Britain was booming as never before.
Billionaire erotica
Russia's new billionaires are always searching for new ways to spend their money and Sergei Rodionov has hit on one, says The Sunday Times. He's publishing a book of photographs dedicated to the "carnal appeal" of Olga, his wife. The Book of Olga
is largely the work of the French photographer who took Jacques Chirac's official portrait, Bettina Rheims. Rheims has photographed Olga, 34, in a variety of erotic poses, some with women, others with men, none involving much clothing.
"Her husband initially wanted to keep the photographs," says The Sunday Times, "but he liked them so much he decided to share them with a global audience."
