Thursday, 30 October 2008

Reader's letter of the day

From today's London Lite, in reply to the question "Does Tony Blair deserve £12m?"

NO ONE is worth that amount for a talk. I think we all know what this is about. Pay-off time comes after they leave office and they have to appear to earn it. 


Sid Siddle, Shoreditch

2 comments:

The Remittance Man said...

If we assume Sid's hypothesis is correct (a fair assumption) then you've missed the real beauty of it from the payer's perspective:

Firstly; he's delayed payment for several years, thereby scoring the opportunity cost of the payola. You can bet that most payees, being economically illiterate former politicians, would not understand the concept of opportunity cost and hence they wouldn't have accounted for this in the negotiations.

Secondly; he actually gets some other schmucks (those stupid enough to pay for tickets to the chance to hear some hasbeen pol speak) to cover some of the cost.

A much better scheme than used fivers in brown paper bags.

Mark Wadsworth said...

RM, good point. And this way round avoids the problem that you pay a politician up front and he fails to deliver his part of the bargain. You can't sue on that sort of contract, so paying after the event is the only way to do it.