EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: How Does Tony Blair Spend $100 Million on Staff Annually?

He makes light of claims he’s amassed a personal fortune of £50 million or more via a property empire whose jewels include South Pavilion at Wotton, Buckinghamshire, once the home of Sir John Gielgud, and a five-storey London townhouse near Hyde Park which has tripled in value since he snapped it up for £3.65 million in 2004.

But Tony Blair – named on President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to run post-war Gaza – isn’t remotely coy about the fact his eponymous institute is awash with cash.

Newly published figures show that it lavished almost $100 million (£75 million) on its directors, ‘strategic counsellors’ and other staff last year.

It’s a sum that’s tens of millions more than the entire income of traditional ‘think-tanks’, let alone their staff costs.

But Blair’s institute is, of course, not remotely traditional, being funded by the likes of the Gates Foundation – established by Bill Gates, the billionaire whose relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein has provoked understandable distaste – the United Nations Development Programme and Larry Ellison, the American software tycoon who founded Oracle and who is now even richer than Gates.

These and other entities flooded Blair’s empire with £120 million in 2024.

Such riches enabled the institute – a cheerleader for the introduction of ID cards – to extend its tentacles into another eight countries.

They also made it possible to reward one unnamed director with $1.3 million (£966,000).

But that was not Blair himself, who studiously avoids accepting payment from his own institute.

He’s less fussy, though, when earning a crust away from the institute – as was memorably illustrated in 2022 when he appeared at a conference in the Bahamas hosted by Sam Bankman-Fried, ‘the Bernie Madoff of crypto’, who, two years later, was convicted of looting $8 billion (£6 billion) from his customers and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The BBC makes much of the fact its hit series The Traitors is filmed at Ardross Castle in the Scottish Highlands. But Mark Bonnar, who is competing in the celebrity version of the show, first broadcast last night, was shocked to discover how much fakery is involved.

‘You lean against the Aga and it’s wood, and you’re like, “I thought it would be real”,’ says the actor, 56.

Laughing at herself, it’s Ambika the birthday girl 

One Day star Ambika Mod may be used to seeing herself on screen, but even she was amused to come face-to-face with a life-sized cut-out at her birthday party.

She wrote alongside a photo of the moment at an event in London: ‘Thirty is truly a milestone.’

Mod, who played lead character Emma Morley in the hit Netflix adaptation of David Nicholls’ novel, recently opened up about the challenges she’s faced in the business compared with co-star Leo Woodall.

‘If you’re brown, if you’re a woman, if you don’t have any connections, you do have to work ten times harder to get half as far. That’s, sadly, the reality of it,’ she said.

Matt’s not the rock star of old

While The Who drummer Keith Moon threw television sets out of hotel windows in the 1960s, modern pop stars take a less rock ’n’ roll approach to touring.

Matt Willis, formerly hard-partying co-founder of the band Busted, makes sandwiches and practises golf.

‘Sometimes I’ll pack a little lunch the night before and stick it in the fridge,’ explains the bassist, 42, who’s married to TV presenter Emma Willis, 49. ‘It’s normally some kind of chicken and vegetables.’

Of his golf, he says: ‘I’ve just bought this thing, Puttr. But the putting green is too long for my hotel room, so it only works in the dressing room.’

Jamie Oliver has revealed his biggest regret. Five years since his parents Trevor and Sally sold their family pub, The Cricketers in Clavering, Essex, the TV chef admits he’s haunted by his failure to buy it. 

Explaining that it was put up for sale shortly after his own restaurant chain collapsed in 2019 with the loss of 1,000 jobs, Oliver, 50, says: ‘I’d just lost my restaurants and I couldn’t afford it. And that’s one of my big, huge, life regrets.’ 

Baronet who died at lunch leaves staggering sum

He led a rarefied life – playing cricket for Eton against Harrow at Lord’s, replacing his family’s Victorian mansion in Hertfordshire with what’s been described as ‘arguably the most handsome country house built since the war’, and enjoying a happy marriage which ended only with his death, aged 90, last December while lunching with a friend at White’s, the starchiest of London’s gentlemen’s clubs.

But Sir Thomas Henry Milborne-Swinnerton-Pilkington, 14th baronet – known as Tommy – was no mere triple-barrelled toff, but the shrewdest of men.

As North Sea oil pioneer Algy Cluff put it in one of his dazzling miniature portraits of friends and one or two rogues, nothing was decided in the boardroom without passing the ‘What would Tommy say?’ test.

Probate documents, which have just been published, endorse that assessment. He left £38.3 million – of which the taxman managed to grab just £122,000. Distressing news indeed for ‘Rachel from Accounts’.

Wills’ secret visit 

Prince William finished his military service in 2013 but remains fit enough to suggest that he’s in no mood to become an armchair general.

So I’m intrigued that earlier this week William, pictured in his Navy uniform, paid a necessarily secret visit to the Special Boat Service (SBS) at its headquarters in Poole, Dorset – renewing an association which began in 2008. 

That was when William became the first royal to spend time with all three elements of the Special Forces – the SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and the Special Air Service. 

Though kept clear of war zones, he did ten days with the SBS as they combatted drug trafficking and piracy in the Caribbean. A definite sniff of the action.