PETER MANDELSON, Baron of Foy and Hartlepool is now secretary of state for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and president of the Board of Trade. He obviously thinks he merits a salary as big and impressive-sounding as his new job and his new title.
On top of his £100,000-plus cabinet salary, he will get a ‘parachute payment’ of £6,500 each month for three years to compensate for his old job as EU commissioner in Brussels. He will also get a £31,000 a year pension from his 65th birthday, rising with inflation. To get that privately, Mandelson would need a pension fund of £750,000. All together his ‘golden goodbye’ adds up to £1 million.
This year, Mandelson was a summer holiday guest on multi-billionaire Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska’s yacht. Purely coincidentally of course, Oleg got £50 million worth of EU trade concessions on aluminium import duties.
Clearly Mandelson will be every inch a minister for the rich, and he will be part of a government that is looking at job cuts, wage freezes and attacks on pension rights for the rest of us.
