I HOPE Tony Blair can sleep easy knowing he's forked out more than a third of my annual salary on a bed.

But I suppose it was a drop in the ocean for the Blairs. When you're reaping in almost half a million pounds each year I don't think £3,500 will make tilt their bank balance.

What it does do, I am sure, is irritate the majority of their supporters who voted Labour into office to eradicate low pay and stop the fat cats getting fatter.

The Blairs' new six-foot-long bed - described as the Rolls Royce of luxury sleeping - cost £3,526.

As a poverty-stricken student I worked in a factory where the average wage for shopfloor employees was around £5,000. They worked 7am to 4.30pm each day in a dismal warehouse production line.

Ask them if they get a good night's sleep, worrying about how they'll pay the mortgage and the bills, or find enough cash to buy the weekly groceries.

I'm sure Mrs Blair, a barrister and QC, won't lose any sleep over how she will afford her next designer outfit, her health and fitness club membership, or the sessions with her alternative therapist.

Oh no, she's got her aides to deal with the anxiety of day to day life.

Gone is the family-next-door image the Blairs promoted during their election campaign. Gone is the down-to-earth, one-of-us impression Tony projected as he posed for photographs in his constituency's Labour club.

I can imagine the next Blair family photo-shoot: Tony, Cherie and the kiddies cuddling up on their double-decker springed, ventilated, three-zoned, fully-flexible Duxiana bed. And, what's worse, it's Swedish.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.