TONY BLAIR’S last major trade union loyalist, the President of the TUC, will get more than £250,000 this week to quit his union early.

Roger Lyons will leave the 1.1 million-strong Amicus union on Wednesday with severance worth three years’ pay and with a pension of two thirds of his salary. He will continue to use office facilities at the union’s headquarters in Covent Garden while he is the figurehead for the TUC.

Mr Lyons had been joint general secretary along with the leftwinger Derek Simpson but late last year he was forced to give up executive powers after a power battle between the two and amid Mr Lyons’s attempts to stay on past his term of election.

Details of Mr Lyons’s severance come as Amicus campaigns today for changes to the statutory redundancy pay. At present someone made redundant after 20 years’ service is entitled to only a statutory minimum payment of £8,100 — a thirtieth of Mr Lyons’s severance. The Blairite union leader’s large pay-off is also likely to embarrass the TUC, which has campaigned against high executive remuneration. Mr Lyons’s severance follows the union’s voluntary redundancy terms of giving four weeks’ pay for every year of service.

A ruling last month by the union’s certification officer said that Mr Lyons could not remain as joint general secretary without a fresh election. He had said he had a contract which guaranteed his employment until 2007 which was drawn up before Amicus was created through the merger of the AEEU engineering union and the MSF white-collar union. But that was judged inappropriate by the certification officer because of Mr Lyons’s age at the time of the merger two years ago when he was 59.

All union leaders have to face election every five years unless their re-election falls due when they are within five years of retirement and then they can remain in office.

Mr Lyons said that his severance terms matched the contract he had expected to be honoured before the certification officer’s decision, which he described as “rubbish”.

Mr Lyons is now likely to create bigger rifts between the TUC and its main constituent unions as he focuses on his role as President. An unrepentant Blair loyalist at a time that most unions have become far more critical of new Labour, he is expected to strike a contrary tone to that of the main unions. He said: “People like me bang the drum about the positive aspects of Labour and I will continue to do so.”

'Tony must go'

Union anger with the Prime Minister rose yesterday with Derek Simpson, the general secretary of Amicus, joining calls for Tony Blair to resign.

Mr Simpson said that the Government’s policies were failing working people and were in danger of leading Labour to electoral defeat. Speaking on the eve of an Amicus conference in Scarborough today, he said: “Blair has got to go. You don’t want to say it. Other people have urged him to go in the past. I’ve never called for him to quit.”