Tony Blair gets himself a bank job

Being the West's peace envoy for the Middle East is all very prestigious, but it doesn't pay the mortgage - especially one on a large house in London's Connaught Square. So Tony Blair will be relieved to have picked up his first big bucks job as a part-time advisor to JP Morgan, the blue-chip Wall Street bank, where he is expected to provide political and strategic advice and take part in 'client events'. His pay is secret, but the general reckoning this morning is that he will receive an annual £500,000 for two or three days' work a month.

JP Morgan's chief executive Jamie Dimon told the Financial Times: "I went to visit him and we hit it off." He said Blair would be "enormously valuable" to the company. "There are only a handful of people in the world who have the knowledge and relationships that he has."

The former prime minister, who has concentrated on his unpaid Middle East role since quitting 10 Downing Street in June, told the FT that he expects to take on "a small handful" of similar appointments with other companies, adding: "I have always been interested in commerce and the impact of globalisation." (Continued below)

The position at JP Morgan - like that of his Tory predecessor John Major, who joined the Carlyle Group - is understood to have been approved by the independent business appointments advisory committee which oversees all jobs taken by former ministers.

Those who thought Tony and Cherie Blair might have bitten off more than they could chew when they blew £3.5m on the Connaught Square property in 2004 - not to mention their recently rumoured desire to buy a substantial country pad too - need no longer worry. With a 'small handful' of such appointments, and the recently signed £5m deal for his autobiography, it looks like the mortgage repayments won't be a problem, even without an interest rate cut.