Blair’s new job takes earnings to £7m a year

First Tony Blair took a bank job, now he's added an insurance job to his post-retirement portfolio. The former Prime Minister's new role - as an adviser to Switzerland's biggest insurer, Zurich Insurance - promises a six-figure salary that will take his post-Downing Street earnings to more than £7m this year. Zurich is tight-lipped on how much Blair will earn but, based on his £2.5m annual salary as a part-time adviser to Wall Street bank JP Morgan, it is thought to be substantial.

Blair's new job comes with a philanthropist twist: he will be advising the company - which could pay out tens of millions of pounds for claims over floods, hurricanes and droughts caused by global warming - on the implications of climate change. Zurich hopes Blair can help the insurer establish "the best way [to] adapt their policies for businesses to take account of climate change," a spokesman said.

Blair said yesterday: "There is a consensus now that the challenge of climate change is real, and what we need now are the policy solutions to turn that concern into action." In taking these jobs, Blair has agreed not to lobby Gordon Brown or any minister or official on banking or climate change for his new employers until next July.

The appointment is the fourth deal negotiated by Blair since leaving office. He will receive a £5.8m advance for his memoirs and half a million pounds from Washington Speakers Bureau Inc for a worldwide tour of speaking engagements.

Why the rush to take on so many high-profile jobs since giving up the Premiership? The not-so-small matter of a mortgage in London's Connaught Square aside, Blair is said to be keen to earn as much as he reasonably can over the next year because he hopes to become the EU's first Permanent President of the Council of Ministers from the start of 2009. If he gets the EU job, which would come with a salary of around £200,000, he will have to give up his consultancies.