Blair bodyguard in £50k benefits con

A former police bodyguard for Tony Blair has been jailed for two and half years for swindling more than £50,000 of benefits.

Vaughan Dodds, 45, and his wife mandy had committed a ‘sophisticated and planned’ fraud in which he told officials the couple suffered crippling illnesses.

His lies were unravelled after fraud investigators discovered evidence of the couple living a lavish lifestyle – including photos of the family sipping cocktails and dancing on their cabin beds in a luxury cruise liner.

Dodds received disability benefits for four years after leaving the police force, claiming severe fatigue and depression left him housebound and occasionally suicidal. But investigators found he had been whisking his family away on holidays to egypt and florida, and spending £60,000 on restaurants and beauty salons.

He also made crooked claims for his 47-year- old wife mandy, telling officials she suffered a hearing condition so acute that she could not even stand the noise of toilet paper tearing.

But Teesside Crown Court heard she was spotted on a motorbike and blow-drying hair at a family-owned beauty salon.

Dodds, of Langley moor, County Durham, was convicted of nine counts of fraud relating to benefits claimed between April 2005 and December 2009.

Sentencing, Judge Graham Cook said the offences were ‘sophisticated’ and had involved a degree of planning.

He added: ‘It is made very much worse by the fact that you were a serving police officer and the public expect more of a police officer because you should know more than most the difference between right and wrong.’

Dodds left the force after 14 years service, during which he guarded mr Blair’s home in Sedgefield, County Durham.

over four years, he fraudulently claimed £56,187 in Disability Living Allowance, income support and council tax benefit for himself and his wife.

At the same time, the jury heard that the couple then began to live a ‘lifestyle they could not have otherwise afforded’.

Nigel Soppitt, defending, said: ‘His good character has gone.’