Read the original article at The Daily Express

Pop groups are not to be sneered at when it comes to exports and the developing world needs that sort of international success.

It is also the case that £5million amounts to a tiny drop in the ocean of cash which is the overseas aid budget.

Nevertheless, giving that sum to an Ethiopian girl band which has previously received £4million strikes a discordant note. There are other ways of empowering women and the band has already been helped to the point where it must succeed or fail on its own. Ethiopia is horrible.

Three years ago I visited a slum outside Addis Ababa where 24,000 people shared 200 holes in the ground for lavatories and where there was no fresh water supply.

Disease was rife, food was scarce and people lay in huts with bits of cloth for roofs – £5million would pay for that ghastly place to be rebuilt and equipped with sanitation but instead it goes to a group of healthy, well-fed career girls.

No, minister. No, no, no.

This is the sort of expenditure I hate because every time it happens there are demands for the aid budget to be cut. As I have said many times, it does not need to be cut with all the suffering there is in the world but it certainly needs to be redirected.

It should not go anywhere where it is likely to be siphoned off into the Swiss bank accounts of cruel dictators, nor be wasted on politically correct nonsense such as climate change initiatives in countries where there is not enough food to go round and certainly it should not be used to further the ambitions of girl bands who have already had help.

The British public would have more sympathy with the vast amount we send overseas if it were to be visibly spent on food production, medicine, water supplies, sanitation, education, housing and economic stimulants such as infrastructure and skills. Am I the only one left who thinks so?