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Thursday, March 27th, 2008

And your pants too..

Apologies if this breaks the cycle of philosophically grand hogwash i usually reserve for JB; (yes Al, you can stop gazing at my navel now, thanks ever so much) but since i am, for once, not making powerpoint slides that break new ground in the art of meaningless verbosity until 4 this morning, i thought i would blind you with the brilliance of some of my orginal thoughts instead.

The point I am trying to make is, that I am as open to sleeping my way to the top as the next person, but frankly the Macca settlement has me appauled - surely this cant be just (Rod Liddle, Sunday Times):

Tucked away in the small print of the entertaining McCartney-Mills divorce settlement was a £50,000 annual sum payable to the lovely Heather for “charitable donations”. Nobody seemed to think this odd apart from Heather, who, being an extraordinarily generous woman, had asked for £627,000 per annum to “donate to charity”. This sum included £192,000 for private flights, not including helicopters (that was another £120,000), so she could give of herself to the poor, the needy, the dispossessed millions – always travelling first class, natch.

The judge balked and settled for just £50K, or double the average UK wage. In a sense the difference between what Heather wanted and what the judge saw fit to give doesn’t matter: it is the principle of the thing. The point of the court case was to assess how much money Heather deserved to get by on, and the court – and the press – seemed to accept that she should be awarded a sum to devote to the charity of her choice – Land Mines for the Blind, or whatever. Because giving vast sums of money to charity is a human right, even if you don’t have that money in the first place. It is not the self-sacrifice of forking out your hard-earned cash because you wish to help others; it is the right to feel good about yourself. It is not “charity” at all; it is uncharity: self-love and self-aggrandisement.

Earlier in the week it was revealed that Sentebale, the southern African charity set up by Prince Harry to provide for the orphans of Aids victims, had given only £84,000 of its £1.15m annual donations to the people it was intended to help.Some of the money went on salaries, including around £90,000 to the Director based in Lesotho, transport, publicity and a payment to an arts firm run by a chap called Geoffrey Matthews. Geoff happens to be the part-time chief executive of Sentebale, from which he draws a salary adjacent to £40,000 a year.

The suspicion grows that “charity” today is a bit of a racket. It’s all the more ugly when it’s a charity with which famous people, or wannabe famous people, are associated. We swallow the questionable notion that in order to campaign effectively our big charities need chief executives, glossy advertising, shiny Mercedes 4×4s to tear across the veld, a legion of PRs working out of grand central London headquarters, lobbyists and consultants – otherwise the poor little black children will die. Somewhere along the way the point has been lost – nowhere better exemplified than in our apparent acceptance that Heather Mills should be awarded money to “give to charity”

Starting from a completely undefensible position, Heather seems to have pulled off quite a coup- because she still walks away with a very significant settlement, i am sure she would have ended up with a lot less had she been more reasonable to begin with..

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