'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Why Blair wants Dahlan to retake Gaza?

The Mail Online's Nick Pisa recently put together a great series of photos of Tony Blair, Middle East envoy extraordinaire (very extraordinaire!) reclining and romping aboard various rich people's luxury yachts between 2004 and roughly last week.

Pisa wrote,

Tony Blair still has some rich friends. The ex-prime minister was spotted yesterday living it up on board a £150million superyacht as a guest of the world's fourth richest man...

Blair is, as we know, the person charged by the Quartet with "responsibility" for getting the Palestinian economy up and running. To that end, he and his staff have taken over a whole floor of rooms in the very expensive American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem-- even though Blair is only there for roughly six weeks a year...

But of course, with Blair's penchant for big luxury yachts now well established over the years, he's going to need somewhere in "Palestine" for his rich friends to come in and pick him up, isn't he?

Blair's personal income has been estimated to be above $7 million/year. Average incomes in the OPTs are, I believe, a little lower than that.

Gideon Rachman (to whom goes the HT for the Mail Online story) writes that though there's been much speculation about Blair becoming the first "President" of the EU, with all the anti-materialist pieties he's spouting these days it looks more as if he's running for Pope.

Rachman comments on these pieties:

I would take it all a bit more seriously if Blair hadn’t spent part of the summer as a guest on “Rising Sun”, a vast yacht, owned by Larry Ellison, the Californian billionaire.