Matthew Norman: The Blairs and the Clintons: divided at last

A little after 5am on Wednesday morning, as the Restoration Comedy on the other side of the Atlantic took on an air (for me, anyway, and my fellow Obamaniacs) of mild tragedy, a comforting thought momentarily leavened the gloom. What, I caught myself wondering, must Tony and Cherie be making of this miracle in New Hampshire?

As they watch Hillary give her victory address, Bill's proud face turning a delirious shade of crimson a respectful few feet behind her, isn't it eating them up inside like battery acid? Mutual admirers the four of them may well remain, but there are few strains of envy so toxic as that between friends whose careers, having once run so smoothly in parallel, have suddenly and diametrically diverged.

For so long, it should be remembered, what went for Tony and Cherie went for the Hill-Billies. The charming schmoozer of a guy and the gauche, flinty gal fell for each other, married young and embarked on what were, unofficially at least, joint political careers. She was the brighter and much the more driven and ambitious of the two, but he had the gift for synthesising sincerity, so in this wicked, sexist old world they came to the accommodation that he would be the front man.

So Bill took the White House and Tony waltzed into Downing Street, and as the boys joined forces to bomb Belgrade, the girls played Lady Macbeth, the First Lady wretchedly failing to sort out American health care and the self-styled First Lady of Downing Street hosting pointless No 10 summits whenever she could. Every now and then, the four of them would get together for a cosy weekend at Camp David or Chequers, and for five years they bestrode the world like the colossal pals the four of them so ostentatiously were.

And then, as all good things must, it came to an end. Billary's time was limited (or so we presumed) by the constitutional two term limit, the Supreme Court shoehorned his successor into the Oval Office, and now it was George W and Laura for whose benefit Cherie packed those gonad-crushing jeans Tony wore for his first big date with Dubya. Yet the friendship between the Clintons and the Blairs survived this transfer of allegiance, and who can say that on a Clintonian visit to a Labour conference the four of them didn't plan languid holidays together in Tuscany or Dubai, or on Silvio Berlusconi's yacht or at Cliff Richard's Bajan villa, when they could look back on their shared transatlantic adventures and laugh at all the madness, and persuade each other how little they missed it?

If they are laughing today, they are laughing at different things in very different tones. The Clintons are screaming with ecstatic mirth at how the least foreseen election result in modern history has made them favourites to return to the White House a year from now. And the Blairs? They are coyly giggling all the way to the bank.

Or to be precise, the investment bank JP Morgan Chase, which has graciously consented to pay Tony a modest stipend of some £500,000 per annum to... well, to do nothing, we may presume, other than attend the odd board meeting, allow his name to be appended to the letterhead, and above all to open up his dazzling contacts book to a financial institution evidently in need of additional funds to bolster current assets estimated at a measly $1.5 trillion (£750,000bn for the less numerate among us).

What tremendous luck that Mr Blair's other job – bringing eternal peace to the Middle East – is another sinecure that allows him the time to discharge his new duties as link man between a fiscal institution of scarcely credible wealth and those troublesome parts of the world in which it needs help to enrich itself further. When JP Morgan wants to snap up some tasty action in the gas fields of Siberia, but is struggling to persuade the Russians to comply, who they gonna call? A political ghost who can bust his way into Vladimir Putin's office, that's who, to grease the wheels of global commerce.

Far from swooning with shock on reading about the appointment yesterday, most of us will be surprised that it's taken him six months since vacating Downing Street to unveil the first of what will be many juicy consultancies. Even in office, he spent ages on the phone to his chum Silvio Berlusconi trying (in vain) to broker a satellite TV deal in Italy for his guv'nor Rupert Murdoch, so it was inevitable that he would reprise that role as the plutocrats' favourite middle man when free to do so for cash.

For all that, there is still something gruesome about his refusal to make do with the £5m for his memoirs and the millions more he can pick up each year for treating the star-struck of the east and west coasts to droll after-dinner anecdotes about Bill and Hillary and all his other great mates from the geopolitical pantheon.

While we may find even less dignity in this than in Harold Wilson's brief career as a chat show host, unforgettably excruciating though that was, Mr Blair is entitled to make money as he pleases. He won't be the first former PM to make a pile from an investment bank, John Major having done very nicely out of the Carlyle Group – and while it is unimaginable than Gordon Brown would ever travel this same inelegant path, he probably won't be the last.

Even so, the contrast between the careers of recent former prime ministers and presidents couldn't be more humiliating. Mrs Thatcher sat in Chelsea, cocooned by whisky and obsequious loyalists into imagining she still ran the show, Wilson made a fool of himself on telly and Edward Heath boasted to visitors to his charming house in Salisbury Close about all the Ming treasures given to him by his beloved Chairman Mao.

Meanwhile, although Bush the First joined his Gulf War I teammate Major on the Carlyle board, Jimmy Carter deservedly became a Nobel Peace Laureate, Richard Nixon rebuilt his reputation as a statesman as best he could, and even Ronnie Reagan had time before succumbing to Alzheimer's to institute his Freedom Award.

Frankly there are more profound causes for despair this week at the democratic gulf between Britain and the US than this. For one thing, the vibrancy of debate and visceral excitement of the presidential race renders the sclerotic staleness and apathy that suffuses our system more dispiriting than ever. For another, the emergence of a serious and still viable black candidate painingly reminds us that yes, we have no Obamas, we have no Obamas today.

But somehow nothing strikes me as quite so depressing, at the very moment the Clintons pick up that West Wing scent again and dream anew of the Restoration, as the vision of Tony and Cherie once and for all cementing their status as high priest and priestess of Eurotrash greed.