Arianna Huffington

The Slog discovers that red teeth, sharp claws and vivid sunsets stretch far beyond the borders of Botswana

There is a price for everything, but every thing comes at a price. For Huffington Post founder Arianna, the price of phenomenal wealth has emerged, albeit belatedly: the sack for a quarter of the staff who helped her make the money. Now of course, without her risk-taking entrepreneurialism, they wouldn’t have had a job in the first place. But my consistently-made point remains: without employed citizens to consume its output, free-market capitalism simply cannot work. It is Page One common sense.

Compare and contrast the $135M Ms Huffington made with the slightly smaller £35M scooped by Alan Sugar when he sold a real business making stuff to BSkyB in 2007. Sugar’s first non-negotiable demand when he sat down to talk to BSkyB was that the 23 staff who started with him should get £1M each. So Sir Alan – whose most famous words are ironically “You’re fired” – created 23 millionaires while trousering 25% of the Huffington haul. However, the Greek lady’s gift to the workforce was a free place in the unemployment line; and a large welfare bill for the Federal Government.

Reaganomics and trickle-down unemployment: it’s the only way to fly. Except, of course, that Arianna Huffington’s online namesake is anti-big business, pro-Green and fiercely Democrat. Last month, she gained my admiration as a Presidential candidate worth changing the US Nationality of Birth laws for. How wrong I was. Beware all Greeks bearing gifts.

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A range of important events occurred while I was looking through binoculars at Africa’s dwindling wildlife last week, but nothing happened, as such. Just as that screen on the plane shows passengers where they are on the seemingly endless journey to somewhere else, so we have moved forward at a now familiar snail’s pace towards nowhere in particular. Prince Andrew, it was mooted, would move from Saudi-shagger to Rugger-bugger, having been outed by the Mail as a Gaddafi-groupie….along with Tony Blair, George W Bush, Gordon Brown, and a range of senior business figures too litigious to mention. More on this later along with the Hackgate update, but the Murdoch press is having a field-day this morning with Eugenie’s necklace gift….and it seems the Andy-Fergie relationship is at last ‘tense’ – a change I for one never expected to see.

Something that has remained unchanged since the Falklands War is the need of all Prime Ministers to look for their own version of it – just as Mrs Thatcher in turn was looking for her own Dunkirk. The decision by David Cameron to enter the Libyan conflict will probably be seen by more mature Britons at some time in the future as the final evidence of Britain’s decadent insanity; from a closer vantage point, I’m afraid it remains for me an idea that would’ve been an excellent one without Iraq, Afghanistan, and national bankruptcy having gone before. As it is, I suspect the Prime Minister is now as low in my estimation as he’s likely to get….but only because I have a sneaking feeling that he may not  be around for that much longer.

Meanwhile, the journey of the eurozone into history took on an almost New Orleans jazz-funereal air. The rooty-toot of Merkelian schadenfreude played a jaunty background riff as EU summitry’s bassoon gave out a loud raspberry. But nothing was able to drown the clatter of Ireland’s economy and Portugal’s austerity crashing onto the thin ice below their clay feet. Metaphors don’t come any more mixed than those, but on the other hand, the overall image portrayed therein – the EU as a funeral procession tramping along on thin ice, with no graveyard in sight – I find very apt, in a surreal sort of way.

And talking of surreal, perhaps the last word should go here to Rainer Bruederle, the German politician who sought to reassure 20 business leaders last week by explaining that his Party’s U-turn on nuclear power “reflects the fact that, with State elections coming up, political decisions will not be rational”. There is a wonderfully unconscious suggestion here that all electorates are mad, but also a slightly more disturbing belief that decisions taken with no elections in sight are normally sane.