So, would you wipe someone's backside for £5 an hour? This was the question posed by an angry woman to Mr Blair last week on a politics show on Five.
The simple answer, of course, is no. Because if the backside is sufficiently dirty to need a whole hour's cleaning, we'd all need a damn sight more than a fiver. But actually there's a much better retort.
Not that long ago the unskilled school-leaver faced a stark choice. Become a nurse and spend the rest of your life wiping bottoms, or become one of those people who've chosen not to wipe other people's bottoms by going down the mine.
Actually, it wasn't just the unskilled that were given limited options. I've just remembered that the careers form I was given at school asked me to tick one of the following options: solicitor, accountant, estate agent, or "other". I ticked "other" and when asked to give details, displayed the prepubescent wit that has stood me in such good stead over the years by writing: "I want to be the world's first homosexual astronaut."
After I came out of detention, I explained to the careers master that I didn't care what I did just so long as it didn't involve wearing a suit. He was amazed. "Look, boy. You either wear a suit and become an estate agent, or you'd better get practising with the Andrex." And this was only 1978.
Now let's spool forward to 2005 when it's possible to make a decent living putting pine cones in paper doilies and flogging them to bored blonde stick-insect women as firelighters for £11 a pop.
I'm not joking. Someone has convinced the owners of my local farm shop that what they really need to stock are pine cones in paper bun holders. Isn't that fantastic?
These days it's even possible to be an author even if you have no real idea for a book, no literary skills whatsoever, and you are due at a coffee morning in two hours' time.
Right next to the pine cone firelighters, I found a small tome called . . . wait for it . . . The Incomplete List of Cat Names.
Now look. You can call a cat anything. Gravel. Honda. Stereo. Wardrobe. Cauliflower. Hitler. Which means this book is just a list of some words. So, if you're the woman on Five who doesn't want to wipe other people's bottoms for £5 an hour, why not write The Incomplete List of Food Names. Just write "beans, meat and arugula", and you're the next J K Rowling.
If you can't think of an incomplete list that needs writing, or your chosen topic has already been the subject of a Channel 4 list programme, which is likely, don't despair. Simply count the number of broken windows there are in your street and sell the information to one of the government's 529 quangos.
A man called Charles Landry was quoted in the newspapers last week. So what's he done, you may ask; cloned a mosquito, solved climate change? No. He has counted how many times the phrase "at risk" appeared in the papers in 2003 and compared it with the number of times it appeared in 1994.
I don't know anything about Mr Landry's financial circumstances or how much he's paid to count words in newspapers. But even if it's not much, it is better than wiping miners' backsides. Or inseminating turkeys. Or sliding food and household products over a bar code reader. And it's certainly better than getting an outreach counselling job through The Guardian.
Michael Howard tells us that for every thousand people in this country, two will be doctors, three will be police officers and nine will be civil servants. This is why the civil service now employs more people than the total population of Sheffield. And it's why the Tories want to blow it apart.
Of course, those on the left wonder what all those people from the British Potato Council and the Wine Standards Board will do when the machinegun fire starts. Well, look. If someone is daft enough to think that monitoring British wine is a worthwhile way of passing the time, then anything is possible. I once met a man who sexes the Queen's ducks, for instance.
What is more, we read last week of a man who was paid to run around a shopping centre pretending to be a racing car. If the arts appeal, then why not be a ventriloquist? There are only seven left in the whole of Britain. Or you could eat food, and then get paid for saying whether you like it or not. Or you could stuff a heron. I'd pay £200 for such a thing.
And finally there's this business of being a homosexual astronaut. Just 25 years ago the mere suggestion that I might like to do this for a living earned me a spell in detention but now there's a lobby group in America called the Organisation of Gay and Self-Loving Men in Orbit.
It reckons that homosexual men have better visual-spatial and dexterity skills than straight chaps and that they display a greater number of hyper-masculine characteristics. Plus. They're unlikely to get women crew members pregnant on long journeys to Mars.
I hope His Toniness finds this information useful. Because the next time he's asked about the alternatives for Britain's bottom wipers, instead of sitting there looking like a complete custard, he can say: "Go and be a gay spaceman instead."