Tony Blair's private office has received secret donations totalling &pound500,000 from a group of multi-millionaires.

Because the donations are to a "blind trust" administered on behalf of the leader's office and not the Labour Party, they will not be covered by Labour's pledge to publish the details of all donations of more than &pound5,000.

Among the donors are Sir Trevor Chinn, chairman of Lex services, one of the country's biggest motor dealers, Sir Emmanuel Kaye, whose fortune derives from an industrial truck company, Bob Gavron, publisher, and Alex Bernstein, former chair of Granada television.

It is a truth universally acknowledged in politics that money buys influence. Tycoons make an investment if they believe it will yield a return. There seems no reason to think that the recent gifts to the Labour leader should be any different.

What's the money for? With some twenty staff members, Blair's office is bigger than any of his predecessors' and appears to be growing weekly. The "blind trust" (if the Tories did this Mandelson would dub it a "a secret slush fund") comes on top of &pound360,000 the leader receives from the Party and the unions plus the money allocated to HM Opposition from Government funds.

Resources on this scale make the leader's office an autonomous power in the land, immune to the mechanisms of either public or party accountability.