Tony Blair trousers £50,000 for speech to toilet roll manufacturers

Former British prime minister Tony Blair will pocket £50,000 for addressing a US conference of toilet roll and disinfectant manufacturers. The Reverend Tony will be the keynote speaker on Thursday at the International Sanitary Supply Association (ISSA) in Orlando, Florida. The conference is attended by thousands of executives from firms selling products from vacuum cleaners to tampons and lavatories.

Guests will be expected to gift a donation of $1,000 to secure the best seats for Blair's talk, which is billed to last just 40 minutes. It is estimated that Blair, who led the UK as prime minister between 1997 and 2007, has pocketed £20 million from public speaking since he left power.



The billing for his speech trumpets his appearance and gives a glowing review of his time in power: "During his ten years as Prime Minister, Mr Blair transformed Britain's public service through a program of investment and reform in school and hospitals, resulting in more children achieving better school results and more people receiving faster access to health care, with improved survival rates for cancer and heart disease. It continues: "He has been a strong advocate of a values-based, activist and multilateralist foreign policy - an agenda that combined tackling terrorism and intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone."

Nowhere is there any mention of the scandal of the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, dirty tricks by his spin doctors, Labour sleaze involving wealthy donors, the death of Ministry of Defence weapons expert Dr David Kelly or Mr Blair’s failure to ‘transform’ the economy, instead leaving the country crippled by debt. Blair's spokesman justified Thursday's speech by saying previous speakers at the ISSA event included Margaret Thatcher, George Bush Senior and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.