Tony Blair and Moammar Gadhafi get down

The "cheat elite" is a term sometimes used to describe powerful movers and shakers who exploit the system to enrich themselves and avoid culpability.

I thought of that term this morning when I read that former British prime minister Tony Blair had six private meetings after leaving office with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The Telegraph reported one of those occurred in January 2009: "JP Morgan, the US investment bank which pays Mr Blair £2  million a year as a senior adviser, was trying to negotiate a deal between the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) and a company run by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a friend of Lord Mandelson. The multi-billion dollar deal, which later fell through, would have seen the LIA provide a loan to Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium producer."

Yesterday, the Telegraph reported that Blair flew at least twice on a private jet supplied by the Gadhafi regime.

Of course, Blair's spokesman has insisted that the former prime minister "has never had any role, either formal or informal, paid or unpaid, with the Libyan Investment Authority or the Government of Libya and he has not and has never had any commercial, business or advisory relationship with any Libyan company or entity".

From that, we're supposed to conclude that Gadhafi supplied the jet simply because he worried about the optics of Blair flying coach.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.