Inside the Grosvenor Square house and spread across its floors are two companies, two charities and Mr Blair’s private office.
In all, about 100 people are based there, although insiders say it is often much quieter because so many of his staff, among them several former Downing Street aides, are travelling at any one time. The offices, once the home of John Adams, the second US president who established the first American mission in London, are rented at a cost of £550,000 a year on a 10-year lease. They cover almost 6,000 sq ft.
Mr Blair is rarely present, turning up perhaps once a month. An analysis by The Sunday Telegraph of his travels, garnered from published sources, shows that in 12 months Mr Blair made 61 trips abroad totalling almost 224,000 miles – the equivalent of travelling to the moon.
A rough calculation suggests Mr Blair, who launched the charity Breaking the Climate Deadlock to combat global warming, has racked up 58 tons of CO₂ emissions in a year through jet travel alone. That’s about 30 times that of the average British adult.
Mr Blair may have travelled far more than that but these are the trips we know about. He is reckoned to spend as little as two months a year in the UK.
The trips, from April 1 2010 to March 31 last year, included frequent visits to Jerusalem, where he is a Middle East peace envoy; and to Africa, where his charities do much of their work. The US and China were also popular destinations. The trips occasionally appear to mingle business, philanthropy and pleasure.
In the summer of 2010 he gave a speech in Shanghai before taking a family holiday with his wife and children in China. There is no mention of the speech on any of his charity’s websites, suggesting he may have been paid for it.
In the space of two days he visited Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan in his capacity as paid adviser to JP Morgan, the US investment bank, and followed that with a faith foundation visit to nearby Sierra Leone. On the Nigerian leg of the journey, Mr Blair was accompanied by the bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who announced plans for a new office in Lagos.
In that time, up until March 31 last year, Mr Blair’s management company Windrush Ventures Limited – established to administer “all the various things he does in the world” – was paid £12 million and made profits of more than £1 million. The company’s tax bill was £315,000.
As The Sunday Telegraph disclosed last week, the tax bill was low because administrative costs of almost £11 million, were offset against the company’s income. About £3 million in expenses went on paying Windrush Venture Ltd’s 26 staff and on office and equipment costs. That leaves about £8 million of expenses, which City accountants, who scrutinised the accounts could not explain.
There are suggestions that at least some of that £8 million could in part be travelling expenses for Mr Blair and his entourage.
Certainly two insiders, who have signed confidentiality agreements and therefore cannot talk openly about their experiences at Grosvenor Square, say not just Mr Blair but many of the staff were often away on foreign travel.
“They spent an incredible amount of expenses on travel. It was absolutely ridiculous,” said one source. The source suggested that Mr Blair rarely, if ever, travelled by commercial airline, flying almost always by private jet. In the past, he has flown in private planes paid for by regimes of Col Muammar Gaddafi and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame, who is accused of human rights abuses.
Mr Blair is under no obligation to explain how the £8 million was spent and there is no suggestion the accounts, audited by KPMG, are anything other than completely legitimate.
Mr Blair, 58, denies that he is motivated by money, pointing out that two thirds of his time is spent on “pro bono activity”. It is a view backed up by his friends and colleagues. “If he wanted to become a billionaire he could have done so,” insisted a friend. “He has not set out to make money; he has set out to achieve a meaningful public role.
“He doesn’t run anything in a shipshape way like a businessman would. He likes employing far more people than a businessman would and that is why his profits are low and his tax is low.”
On the top floor of Mr Blair’s HQ is the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, run by his former Downing Street gatekeeper Ruth Turner. In the basement is another of his charities, the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), whose chief executive is Kate Gross, a former private secretary to Mr Blair at No 10.
In between the top and the bottom floors are the offices where Mr Blair makes his money. His personal study, which he is rarely in, is on the first floor. His private office is described by one insider, as “minimalist and modern but certainly not flash”.
Mr Blair’s closest aides, including Catherine Rimmer, his strategic director, and Matthew Doyle, his political director, both of whom worked in Downing Street, also have offices on the first floor.
The floor above houses staff running The Office of Tony Blair. Anthony Measures, who helped to research Mr Blair’s bestselling memoir A Journey, also had a desk there while the book was being written. Windrush Ventures, whose accounts were filed just before the start of the year, providing a rare glimpse into Mr Blair’s company finances, is described as a trading name for The Office of Tony Blair.
Also on the second floor, in a separate annexe, according to sources, is Mr Blair’s private consulting company, Tony Blair Associates (TBA). The company has a contract with, among others, Kuwait to provide the country with advice on how to govern itself.
A Kuwaiti source has claimed that Mr Blair’s firm stands to earn more than 12 million dinars, equivalent to £27 million, over the course of the contract’s lifetime.
Mr Blair’s spokesman has described those claims as exaggerated.
As far as The Sunday Telegraph is aware, there is no published record of just how much Mr Blair is earning through Tony Blair Associates, which is run with the assistance of Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s former chief of staff.
TBA’s trading name is thought to be Firerush Ventures, a web of companies which appears to run in parallel to Windrush Ventures. Firerush Ventures is registered with the Financial Services Authority.
Both Windrush and Firerush have similar structures consisting of a complicated web of companies, limited liability partnerships and limited partnerships, which hide details of Mr Blair’s affairs from public scrutiny.
The structures are said by tax accountants to be commonplace for companies run by high net-worth individuals.
In an open letter last week railing against last week’s disclosures in The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Blair’s spokesman wrote that Mr Blair is a “50 per cent top rate taxpayer and his businesses pay full UK corporation tax”, before adding: “He also supports, from his earnings, the charities he has established as well as making other donations. There are more than 120 people working on all his activities around the world. He actually spends the majority of his time on unpaid pro bono work in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere.”
Mr Blair’s spokesman, despite repeated requests, has refused to detail how the £8 million of expenses was spent but has said that “travel is a significant cost as is having staff overseas”.
