ME and my MONEY

JOHN Bird, the 70-year-old founder of The Big Issue, has not got a penny saved towards retirement.

He lives in constant hope a wealthy benefactor will come along, decide he is a saint and endow him with a £1million pension.

Or, as he puts it, he is waiting for ‘a posh git with too much money and not enough sense’.

Bird launched The Big Issue in 1991 with Gordon Roddick, who was co-founder of The Body Shop.

In 1995, he was given an MBE for services to homeless people – and in 2015 he became Baron Bird of Notting Hill, a non-party-political peer.

This month, he is celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Big Issue with Up From The Streets, a photographic exhibition at the gallery Proud Camden in North-West London.

Tickets are available for the launch night party this Wednesday at bigissue.com.

Bird lives in Cambridgeshire with his third wife, Parveen, 46, their son Sonny, 11, and nineyear-old daughter Ishy.