Speaking of Public Servants Living the Good Life -- Remember Mark Malloch Brown?

Of course you do. Kofi Annan’s former deputy, former chief of staff, former head of the UN Development Program; now Lord Malloch Brown. He was the British UN bureaucrat who, while doing what he described as “God’s work” at the UN, lived as a tenant on the Katonah, NY estate of tycoon George Soros, paying UN-subsidized rent of about $10,000 per month.

When Kofi Annan left the UN at the end of 2006, so did Malloch Brown — in swift succession receiving a British Knighthood, enjoying a brief affiliation with Yale University, and going to work for George Soros’s ventures.

Then, this past summer, in the U.K., Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, and in a search for foreign policy expertise dipped into Kofi Annan’s old handpicked pool of UN talent, and dredged up Malloch Brown… who not only got himself a Lordship, but a “grace and favour” taxpayer-funded apartment in London, valued by the U.K. Treasury as worth more than the digs above 10 Downing Street. Read all about it in this week’s cover story of The Spectator, in which the Spectator’s James Forsyth and I take a look at “Labour’s Lord of the Perks.”