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Blair flirts with Ryanair

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Stephen McKinley

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair was planning his annual summer holiday in Tuscany this August, it was made known that he would fly on the budget British airline, Easyjet.

Rising to the occasion of a remarkable marketing opportunity, Easyjet splashed its distinctive orange billboards across the country with the words, “Even Tony Blair got a bargain this summer.”

But out of the blue, Blair threw a spanner in the Easyjet works — and changed his flight to rival budget airline, Ireland’s Ryanair.

An Easyjet spokesperson expressed disappointment at Blair’s change of mind. “We were delighted at the publicity,” she said.

She suggested that multiple bookings may have been made for security reasons, but Downing Street has not said why the change of plan was made, only saying that the choice of a budget airline was made for the sake of convenience.

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Last year’s Blair family trip to Tuscany cost the Royal Air Force, and the British taxpayer, _40,000 ($45,000). Blair has no equivalent of the U.S. president’s Air Force One, on which to make foreign trips.

At the Versailles conference in 1919, when American and French diplomats arrived in Paris in the most luxurious limousines manufactured in their home countries, British diplomats displayed typical frugality, arriving on British-made bicycles.

A one-way ticket to Nice on Easyjet would have cost him _42. With Ryanair to Perpignan, Blair will pay _139.99 one way.

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