Blind to the facts or just greedy?

Sting, self-proclaimed “world citizen”, human-rights activist and eco warrior has, it transpires, received £2million to perform at a concert organised by the daughter of Uzbekistan leader Islam Karimov.

This is a man who supposedly kills his enemies in boiling water and slaughters anyone daring to protest against poverty and corruption under his regime.

The singer says he’s aware of the dictator’s “appalling record’’ but claims he went to Uzbekistan because “cultural boycotts” are pointless.

Really? I seem to remember them working in apartheid South Africa.

Sting’s response seems less of a conviction than a convenient excuse to pocket a ludicrous amount of money.I never really liked the sanctimonious singer and this just gives me even more reason not to.

Don't forget, this is the highly-principled musician who proudly tells anyone prepared to listen how his children have a “serious sense of the geopolitics of the globe’’.Perhaps they could give their dad a lesson sometime?

Who on earth really describes their kids like that?

Although never short of a few words of wisdom for the rest of us on carbon footprints, saving the rainforests or Third World debt, he could be described as an adherent of the old adage: "Do as I say - not as I do."

In a 30-year career, which has earned him a personal fortune of more than £100 million, Sting has established himself as not just a pioneering rock singer with his original band the Police - now on a worldwide reunion tour - but as one of the first stars to parade a social conscience.

As early as 1985, he took the seemingly rash decision to step aside from the Police, then at the height of their commercial success, and release what was called by one reviewer a "jazz-inflected personal manifesto" entitled The Dream Of The Blue Turtles.

The first single from the album, which was to launch him on his highly lucrative solo career, was called If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.

At least some of the song's lyrics seemed to touch on Sting's much-vaunted support of recycling and conservation, at a time when many considered these to be fringe issues rather than the global preoccupations they are today.

"We can't live here and be happy with less/With so many riches, so many souls/Everything we see that we want to possess", Sting sang, in one emotive passage.

It was a theme to which he returned at this summer's Live Earth climate change concert, where the reunited Police were among the leading attractions on the bill at Giants Stadium outside New York.

At one point in the performance, Sting pledged to the audience that he would "work to reduce" his carbon footprint in the future.

A commendable objective - but what Sting didn't mention was how much larger his carbon footprint is than just about anyone else's.

He maintains no fewer than four properties in the UK with his 'core' home the 800-acre Lake House estate in Wiltshire, which boasts 14 bedrooms and eight baths.

Earlier this year, a glimpse into Sting's daily routine at the mansion was provided by Jane Martin, 42, a cook who took the rock star and his wife Trudie Styler to an employment tribunal which awarded her £24,944 following her "shameful" dismissal from her job.

According to Ms Martin, Styler in particular had a "grandiose ego" and wanted to be treated "in a royal manner beyond her station as an actress".

Revealing some of the "fabulous" lifestyle of her former employers, Ms Martin said that "opulent extravagance reigned" at Lake House, and that there was "no regard to expense, cost or wastage" where food and drink were concerned.

The cook added that she had often been required to make an expensive rail and taxi journey between London and Salisbury just to prepare a soup and salad meal for the family, even though they also kept two housekeepers, two nannies and a butler on the premises.

But Sting's well-heeled lifestyle in the Wiltshire countryside is only one part of his worldwide empire.

This same paragon of self-denying minimalism who reminds us all not to squander our resources also owns a three-storey mansion in Highgate, North London, a townhouse in Westminster and what's described as a workman's cottage in the Lake District.

He also maintains a beach house in Malibu, California, and a 600-acre estate in Tuscany.

And when Sting performs in New York he goes home at night to a £1 million duplex on Manhattan's exclusive Upper East Side.

His immediate neighbours in Manhattan included his friend and sometime collaborator the late Luciano Pavarotti.

Other rock stars live just as lavishly as Sting does - the difference is that relatively few of them have proved as willing as him to back up their words with generous, and often anonymous, donations to causes around the world.

But he hasn't always been enthused.

Sting was introduced to the Brazilian rainforests by a Belgian author and adventurer named Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, who had made an Oscar-nominated film about the plight of the local Xingu Indians. Sting's initial reaction to Dutilleux's pitch was blunt: "Dolphins, penguins, who gives a ****, JP?" he asked on their first visit to the area.

Despite this unpromising start, Sting and the Rainforest Foundation were eventually able to set up a 12,000 square-mile national park dedicated for the use of the Xingu and other indigenous tribes.

Given the generally lukewarm support of the Brazilian government, this was an impressive achievement.

Sting's involvement included not just giving away money but also a more personal gesture.

While lobbying political leaders around the world, the singer was to play host at his elegant Highgate home to two Brazilian Indian chiefs named Raoni and Red Crow, the former of whom sported a CD-sized wooden plate stitched into his lower lip but little in the way of clothes.

Early in his career, he expressed the opinion that "I just don't agree with (procreation) any more.

"I think it's bull****, and I think if we carry on thinking like that, we're doomed.

"We have too many people - we're not the most important thing on the planet, and until we realise that, we're in deep s***."

How ironic then that Sting has six children, from two wives, ranging in age from 30 to 11.

There's nothing wrong with that - he's long since earned the right to live just as he likes - but, taken as a whole, it would seem to suggest that Sting's campaign against Western excess might not always be a priority in his own day-to-day life.

In 1981, he declared: "I don't want to end up as the guy in Vegas with the balding head and the tux singing Roxanne."

Some 15 years after making this announcement, he walked out on stage at the city's MGM Grand Garden casino, and, sporting a radically cropped haircut, performed his first hit. (To his credit, he avoided the tuxedo.)

In 1995, he was happy to accept a reported £500,000 to advertise the Seagaia golf complex in Japan, where developers had flattened miles of historic pine forests to build a luxury leisure resort.

The contradiction of a man known for his environmental campaigning helping to promote a project that locals complained harmed the local ecology wasn't lost on his critics.

More recently, the singer gave his blessing to an advertisement for a gas-guzzling Jaguar that used his hit Desert Rose as its backing track. Sting was reportedly paid a six-figure licensing fee.

Some may see this as not entirely in tune with his well-known views on energy conservation.

Even his attitude to his band the Police is marked by inconsistency.

Despite the regular recycling of the group's records since their last new release in 1983, until recently the prospect of a full-scale reunion has seemed remote at best.

Asked about the rumours of a tour in 1997, the 20th anniversary of the band's formation, Sting said: "Bull****. I'd rather die."

It may be purely coincidental that his radical change of heart on the subject follows the relative failure of his last album Songs From The Labyrinth, whose accompanying DVD features an extended sequence showing Sting, dutifully followed by his musicians, padding around the well-manicured maze at Lake House.

Whatever, in 2006 Sting decided that reforming the Police was not such a bad idea after all.

The tour, which has played to packed houses in North America this summer, is said to have guaranteed the three musicians an initial payday of £4 million apiece.

One cynic has described it as "the unedifying sight of a pension plan being topped up", although that's unlikely to concern crowds who waited nearly 25 years to see their heroes on an extended European tour.

And although Sting's wife Trudie seems remarkably unconcerned that the singer may see the tour as an opportunity to visit other venues such as the Relax club in Hamburg, it is hardly the behaviour of a man whose social conscience is his calling card.

The tour itself - with its fleet of accompanying trucks, dazzling lighting systems, jet travel and so on - shows no signs of restraint.

It all adds up to a personal carbon output for Sting that has been estimated at up to 30 times that of the average Briton.