KEY POINTS:
One thing is for sure: this time next year, Tony and Cherie Blair will be richer than they are today. No longer will they have to struggle by on Tony's annual salary of £187,611 ($511,225), Cherie's earnings as a barrister - estimated to be about £100,000 a year - plus the £30,000 a time she receives on the international lecture circuit and the knockdown rent of £96,000 a year, minus fees, from their house in Connaught Square. Soon they will be able to make serious money.
However, on June 27, the day Blair goes to Buckingham Palace to hand in his resignation, his income will first of all take a dip - though not a big one - as he becomes a £60,675 a year backbench MP.
The family will also lose the flat over 11 Downing St, and Chequers in Buckinghamshire, which have been their weekday and weekend homes for 10 years, and will have to move to Connaught Square. They bought the house in 2004 for £3.5 million, saddling them with mortgage payments that have been estimated as being as high as £16,000 a month. They will also lose the rent.
To tide them over, Blair will be entitled to a redundancy payment of £31,734, under a rule that came into force 15 years ago, that applies to all ministers who leave office.
A slightly older and more obscure piece of legislation, which applies only to retiring Prime Ministers, means he will also be entitled immediately to a £63,468 pension. That is for life, and in addition to the pension that he will be allowed to start collecting in 2013, when he is 60, for his long service as an MP.
Assuming that he has been paying the maximum contributions since he entered Parliament in 1983, it will be worth about another £40,000 a year.
And it is only the start. It is now a ritual that an outgoing Prime Minister writes his memoirs, for which he receives a huge advance plus the guarantee of lucrative serialisation rights, regardless of whether anyone reads the book.
Blair is reputed to have done a deal already with Random House, which is run by Gail Rebuck, wife of the Prime Minister's long-serving pollster, Philip Gould. The Sunday Times has reputedly bought the serialisation rights. How much the Prime Minister will make from the book remains to be seen, but it almost certainly will not be a penny less than £4 million.
He does not, incidentally, need to write anything himself. Sir Edward Heath's memoirs, which did not reach the bookshops until 14 years after he left Downing St, were ghost written.
However, Tony Blair is likely to write the bulk of his memoirs, though he will doubtless call on assistants for background research.
Then there is the international lecture circuit. In 2004, the Harry Walker agency, in New York, which represents many of the world's highest paid after-dinner speakers added Cherie Blair to their list.
She has carried out several engagements in the United States for around £30,000 a time. She also collected £100,000 for a brief speaking tour of Australia. If she can command that sort of money, then her husband will be able to trouser a six figure sum every time the master of ceremonies bangs the spoon against the table.
There are other vast opportunities - but not every one is going to tempt him. Multinational companies would happily shell out enormous sums to add Blair to their boards of directors, but he has indicated he is not going to accept any offers of that kind for now.
A seat in the House of Lords would also be his for the asking, but he has gone on the record as saying that he will not accept it. He is also entitled to a knighthood, and the idea of becoming Sir Tony and Lady Blair might resonate with the couple.
He is certainly not going to stay in the Commons beyond the next general election, though his agent, John Burton, has said that he will stay on for the next two or three years, to avoid a by-election, unless a "big job" comes up. He has been speculatively nominated for a number of major international jobs, like heading the World Bank, should the current President, Paul Wolfowitz, be forced to leave. But the indications are that, for now, he does not want to be held down in one time-consuming role.
He is expected to opt, like his old friend Bill Clinton, for an informal roving brief that lets him straddle the world. In January, it emerged that the American restaurateur, Martha Greene, who helped the Blairs find their Connaught Square home, had registered the domain name www.blairfoundation.org.uk. This could be simply a precaution, to prevent anyone else using the name to embarrass Blair, but it is more likely that it will soon be an active website.
Blair is expected to launch a foundation to foster greater understanding between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It will also give him a base from which he can involve himself in the other issues expected to engage his attention, including global warming, development in Africa, and peace in the Middle East.
On a more mundane level, when the Blairs move house, there will be home improvements to take care of. Last week, the Blairs obtained planning permission from Westminster Council to add a roof terrace, solar panels and CCTV to their new home, which they are planning to merge with a mews house in neighbouring Archery Close. Neighbours had objected to the plan, claiming a roof terrace would be noisy and smelly, and that solar panels were no more than a fashion accessory, but were overruled.
A recent television play by Alistair Beaton projected Tony Blair's story into the near future, and drew a picture of a man abandoned by old allies, unable to find anything worthwhile to do, or to pay for his lifestyle, and threatened with trial by international court over the Iraq war. That was fantasy. Reality will be much kinder. Blair is like Thatcher or Mikhail Gorbachev - better thought of abroad than at home. American public opinion cannot get enough of him. The Israelis are anxious to deploy him as a peacemaker.
Blair is only 54 years old: no Prime Minister has ever retired so young, and the sudden change will be a wrench for him, but he will be around, an active figure on the world stage, for many years yet.
- Independent
