How Hillary helped Cherie charity rake in £3.3 million
AS U.S. presidential contender Hillary takes over from husband Bill as the top dog of the Clinton clan, Cherie Blair seems determined to show the tectonic plates are shifting in her household, too. I can reveal the former prime minister’s wife has managed to attract £3.3 million to the Cherie Blair Foundation For Women in the past year, putting one of her husband Tony’s charities in the shade.
What’s more, Cherie was given a helping hand by her friends at the U.S. State Department, headed by Hillary, which helped fund a £129,000 project for ‘women’s enpowerment’ in Lebanon.
Billionaire philanthropists Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, have given Cherie’s charity £69,000. ‘Cherie has become a real power in the charity world,’ I am told.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she follows Hillary and moves into politics.’
Cherie did have ambitions to become an MP and stood unsuccessfully as Labour’s candidate in North Thanet in 1983, but abandoned them to support her husband and pursue her legal career. Messages from Cherie to Hillary’s personal email account disclosed last year showed her seeking to broker a meeting between Mrs Clinton and Sheikha Mozah, the wife of the then emir of gas-rich Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa, in 2010.
The emails also revealed Cherie wanted the Sheikha, whose husband boasts a personal fortune of £1.5 billion, to support her Foundation For Women.
Latest accounts for the charity, which she set up in 2008 to promote ‘the sustainable empowerment of women and girls in the developing world’, disclose its income rose by £300,000 since 2014.
The figures, for the year to October 31 last year, show there were also donations from multinational companies including ExxonMobil, Vodafone and U.S. bank JP Morgan, for which Tony works as chairman of its international advisory council for a rumoured £2 million per year.
Staff costs are reported to be £1.02 million, which works out at an average salary of more than £39,000 per year. This was an increase in total staff costs of more than £200,000 on 2014.
By contrast, the Tony Blair Sports Foundation had an income of just £204,000 last year. His other two charities did much better, though, with £2.97 million coming into the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in 2014 and £5.36 million for the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative.