Daily catch-up: Cameron admits the only thing wrong with New Labour political advisers is that there were too few of them
The Government finally published its annual list of special advisers and their salaries yesterday
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Your support makes all the difference.The Government finally published its annual list of special advisers and their salaries yesterday. As exclusively reported by The Independent on Sunday in October, George Osborne has 10 special advisers (including one on maternity leave), although the normal maximum for a cabinet minister is two.
My view is that special advisers are a good thing: political appointees paid out of public money help ministers implement the policies on which they were elected. But that was not the view of the Conservatives in opposition, who promised to "cut the cost of politics" by restricting cabinet ministers to just one special adviser each.
So there is much joy here over the wailing of repentance and the rending of garments as the Prime Minister admits that everything Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did in office was right. Indeed, the only thing wrong with New Labour special advisers is that there weren't enough of them. Eight cabinet ministers now have three special advisers (Theresa May, Sajid Javid, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove, Nicky Morgan, David Mundell, Patrick McLoughlin and Jeremy Hunt – one of them part time). The number of Conservative special advisers has gone up from 69 last year to 96 now, an increase of 39 per cent (many of them replacing the 38 Liberal Democrat special advisers in the coalition) at an average salary of £84,000.
• It comes up all the time, including in this entertaining interview with Bernard Donoughue, who was James Callaghan's adviser. Since stepping down as Prime Minister, Tony Blair "seems to be too concerned with making money". Seems? I wonder why that might be? Take an article in the Daily Mail on 3 December headlined "Tony Blair strikes gold with Brazilian speech". Only that is not what the headline says now, online. Now it says: "Tony Blair's charity strikes gold with Brazilian speech." And it has a note appended: "The headline to an earlier version of this article did not make clear that, as stated in the article itself, the fee for Mr Blair’s speech was donated to his Africa Governance charity. We are happy to set the record straight." The bit where it says, "as stated in the article itself", implies that the article always made clear that the fee was going to charity. Sadly, this is not the case. The print version of the article reads: "One man has already won gold in Brazil. Tony Blair gave a speech in Sao Paulo yesterday, which is thought to have netted him a small fortune." I am sure that Mail Online will be publishing a correction to its correction soon.
• And finally, thanks once again to Moose Allain:
"Yosemite Sam was much more successful after Warner Bros. changed his name from Antisemite Sam."
• The Catch-Up Service is now taking a break until after Christmas.
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