£700,000 - Clinton's bill for just three speeches in London and Dublin

By ANGELLA JOHNSON and WILLIAM LOWTHER, Mail on Sunday

Last updated at 22:00 02 September 2006


Former American President Bill Clinton will earn £700,000 for just three speeches in London and Dublin this month.

Mr Clinton, said to be the highest-paid public speaker in the world, with fees of up to £300,000 a time, will be the first major American statesman to travel across the Atlantic since an alleged plot to blow up flights from the UK to the US was foiled.

He will speak about the threat of global terrorism and of his life in office at a seminar at the Royal Albert Hall on September 26.

The 42nd President will address several thousand leaders of industry and members of the public in what has been described in the promotional brochure as a 'lively discussion and debate' on current affairs, commerce and politics.

Tickets for Mr Clinton's speech, followed by a question and answer session at the 5,000-capacity venue, cost between £60 and £300 each.

The same night he will speak on global poverty and environmental issues to 500 wealthy individuals, including actor Michael Douglas and environmentalist Zac Goldsmith, who have paid £1,000 a head for the launch of Fortune Forum Summit - a not-for-profit organisation aimed at influencing social changes.

The next day he will be guest of honour at a lunch at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin. Guests will pay £1,070 for a pair of tickets. Tickets to Mr Clinton's events are usually bought by corporations as investments in employee morale-boosting.

The former President's money-making efforts have been so prolific it took just two years to pay off his legal debts after leaving office in 2001.

He and his wife Hillary - a Senator for New York - then bought two multimillion-pound houses, one in Chappaqua, New York, for Bill and one in Washington for Hillary's use.

Analysts said at the time that his £80,000-a-year pension would barely cover the mortgages.

But he negotiated a £6million advance on his memoirs - published in 2003 - and began a schedule of delivering 200 speeches a year.

Insiders say his fee varies between £100,000 and £300,000 and he keeps the cash for about a quarter of the speeches.

The money from another 50 goes to his Foundation, which has a budget of £20million a year raised from private donors. The rest are free, to support political causes or raise funds for other charities.

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