Dives and Lazarus

So Tony Blair doesn't seem to be doing too badly out of his time as Prime Minister; not many of us can afford to buy a £1m town house for cash, after all.

Meanwhile, the media are reporting huge donations to the Conservatives by hedge fund bosses.

At personal and organisational level, there's clearly a lot of money to be found in some parts of the political sphere.

In other news, I spent yesterday cooking for a barbecue to help raise a bit of cash for my local party here in North East Cambridgeshire. It was fun; the rain held off enough for the barbecue to light; there were enough burgers to go round, sausages to spare, and the desserts were well received. There were half as many raffle prizes as guests, and we overcame the fact that I'd forgotten to get raffle tickets by pressing into service two packs of Bob Russell MP's Lib Dem MPs playing cards (from about two parliaments ago!) which served as excellent tickets and gave the raffle an additional political overtone.

The profit will help pay the bills for a couple more months, but it's all quite hard work, and relies on the generosity of comparatively few people, who do their duty by buying tickets and donating raffle prizes. One guest yesterday won a bottle of wine smaller than the one he'd brought as a donation, while another effectively paid a fiver to win back his own bottle!

All the coverage of super-rich individual politicians and mega-donations by the exceptionally well-heeled - not to mention the continuing farrago of tales about MPs and their expenses - gives the impression that politics is awash with money. For some of us, however, it's a hard slog to raise the small sums of cash needed just to keep the show on the road.

Nevertheless, it was great fun, though I now have a kitchen that looks as if a bomb's hit it, a year's supply of leftover coleslaw in the fridge, and a lot of washing up still to do ...

Note: for those who don't recognise the reference in the title of this post, Dives and Lazarus is a story about a very rich man and a very poor man from Luke's Gospel (Chapter 16), and probably one of the most popular Bible stories in the medieval period. It's also a great ballad, set to a tune that's used for songs including The Star of The County Down and the hymn I heard the voice of Jesus. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Five Variants of the tune, and there's an excellent version of the song in my music collection by June Tabor and the Oyster Band.