POOR OLD Mr Blunkett, in the wars again. Fresh out of a job after his office became imbrangled in his lover’s nanny’s visa application, he spent a fortnight as a director of a bioscience company, despite the code that advises ex-ministers to ask permission. Returning to Cabinet he kept the shares in the family. The Opposition made hay and Mr Blunkett — affronted, believing he was right all along — had to sell them.

The Prime Minister stood up for him. Just as well. Any display of squeamish rectitude from his direction and his enemies might point jeeringly at his own — less extreme but definite — history of roundabout perks. A Sunday newspaper revealed that Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister and enthusiastic holiday host, has spent four years festooning the Blairs with jewellery including 18 superior watches. Gifts valued more than £140 are “held” by Downing Street, but the PM can buy them at a valuation set by the Cabinet Office. And he does: we are told of such bargains as an eight-place canteen of cutlery from President Putin revalued at £300 and two Berlusconi watches for £175 each. Which suggests either that Putin and Berlusconi are cheapskates, or the happy coincidence that Cabinet Office valuations come just a teeny, convincing bit over 140 quid.

Meanwhile, there are Mrs Blair’s lucrative “charity” speeches in Australia: efforts to claim that she does such things purely as an eminent QC are undermined by the theme of the book that she is selling — prime ministerial spouses. What other barrister could have got a big advance and a paid publicity tour for a book on this theme? Norma Major wrote about opera because she knew about it, Mary Wilson wrote poems. But when insider chat about Downing Street family life is being peddled to fill a private account, then the office of prime minister is being used. Just as it was used when dodgy, sycophantic Peter Foster sent that e-mail saying his company would pick up costs for the Bristol flat deal, and Mrs Blair failed to reply: “Oh no, it won’t! Sweet, but out of the question!”

I am not out to get Cherie Blair, not particularly; what she does — and her husband, on their numerous bargain holidays — is becoming so commonplace, so unremarkable amid the elite of goodie-bag Britain that it hardly excites remark except from those who hate them anyway. You can tell how un-seriously these freebies are treated by the way that the hostile press lump them in with minor gaffes such as opening the door in a nightie. For me, daughter of an old-school civil servant of eye-wateringly strict probity, there is a vast gulf between mere foibles and exploitations of office. I gasp at the light-hearted way that the celebrity culture of discounts, gifts, free flights and couture loans have infected politics. We have come a long way from the scandalised cries that greeted poor Tony Crosland in 1974 when he was given a coffee pot for opening a school, and later found to his embarrassment that the crook Poulson had paid for it.

I blame the celebritisation of politics. As the stardust of personality sprinkled itself over public life, it brought with it the seediness of that world: the vain “Because I’m worth it!” culture. There is a growing illusion (shared, alas, by numerous media people) that one is given gifts and free trips because one is innately lovely; you need only ask for a theatre ticket or new book to receive a free copy, because you are not like normal people who pay. Ministers milk their constituency housing allowances even if they have grace-and-favour apartments in London; ten senior DTI officials have admitted to lying on Barbados and Miami beaches while technically studying “British export prospects” to no avail. According to an Ernst & Young investigation, Christmas lunch for ten of them on the taxpayer involved several bottles of wine and a free bar open for five hours serving 14 vodka and tonics, 23 G and Ts, three mojitos and three whiskies.

Look, boys and girls, read my lips — it just isn’t worth it. You’re well paid, your pensions are enviable, a lot of you have lucrative memoirs and retirement directorships to look forward to. You’re at the top end of an affluent society. Holidays are cheaper than ever, chain stores do excellent clothes, you can pay for your own drinks. Just lay off the freebies, trim the expenses to the bone, think Puritan. If you go on a fact-finding trip, then work all day and bring home some facts. Be aware that lower down the food chain the rules have never been tighter: unpaid parish councillors are forced to declare all their extended family’s shares and, ever since the Nolan report on standards in public life, giving your time free as a museum trustee has been hedged around with questionnaires so insultingly detailed that, as one eminent academic furiously put it: “They make you feel like Del Boy on the make”.

Yet at the top, in showbiz style, senior civil servants binge drink at the Hilton, Mr Blunkett tries to feather his family nest and Mrs Blair parlays Downing Street into a nest egg. They should re-read Nolan’s seven principles of public life: the first being Selflessness. Holders of public office may not seek “financial or other material benefits for themselves, friends or family”. The second is Integrity — not “placing themselves under financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations”.

Nobody is exempt, nothing is too small to count. I don’t seriously think that Anglo-Italian relationships are affected by Mrs Blair getting a bargain watch. I doubt the country will be plunged into recession by a few extra mojitos down DTI necks, nor even that Mr Blunkett would give DNA Bioscience a contract with the Child Support Agency to boost his shares. Yet this casual approach to perks and freebies, halfway between a starlet and a sultan, does the takers infinitely more harm than it is worth. Bring back the instinct for old-fashioned, humourless, relentless, boring probity. Ban the goodie-bag. Work is work and pay is pay: keep them separate.

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