The corruption of British political life could easily be stopped, and ending second jobs for MPs is a very obvious place to start. But that kind of change requires a government – and a prime minister – that respects standards in public life. At the moment, we have neither.
An intensely relaxed attitude to politicians becoming filthy rich emanates from the very top of this government. Boris Johnson flagrantly flouted the rules of parliament’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) when he returned to his £275,000-a-year job as a columnist for the Daily Telegraph just days after resigning as foreign secretary in 2018. Ex-ministers are supposed to wait three months before taking on jobs to avoid them exploiting access to government contacts.
Theresa May – still the MP for Maidenhead – has earned almost £2m on the international lecture circuit since resigning as prime minister two years ago, including being paid £115,000 to address a women’s forum founded by the Dubai ruler accused of kidnapping his daughter (which he has denied).
David Cameron expected that his lobbying for Greensill would net him tens of millions, while Sajid Javid had only been out the door of No 11 Downing Street for six months before taking up a role “advising” JP Morgan for £150,000 a year.
These should be scandals, but they are not – they go on in plain sight. The Conservative MP Geoffrey Cox’s incredibly lucrative moonlighting for the British Virgin Islands was recorded in the register of interests. Last week’s revelations that Tory donors who gave the party £3m and served as the Conservative party’s treasurer have been put forward for seats in the Lords drew from publicly available data on donations to political parties. Tory MPs have declared that they have been paid more than £4m for second jobs.
MPs’ outside earnings have not always been this transparent – for years second jobs were deliberately kept off the books. That was until 1953, when the journalist Andrew Roth was left baffled after watching the Labour MP Richard Stokes make a stridently pro-Arab speech in the Commons. Stokes’s party at the time had a strong pro-Israel position. Why, Roth wondered, had the honourable member for Ipswich taken such a different line. Digging into Stokes’s background, Roth found out that he had a sideline as managing director of an engineering company making heavy machinery for oilfields around the Arab world. That experience inspired Roth to write The Business Background of MPs, and start campaigning for a register of interests to chart MPs’ second jobs.
Roth’s diligence did not, of course, end the scandal of MPs’ second jobs. A register of members’ financial interests did not happen until 1974, after a series of scandals on second jobs. The Nolan inquiry, set up in 1994 after the “cash for questions” scandal in which it was found that a lobbyist working on behalf of the Harrods owner, Mohamed Al Fayed, was paying two Conservative MPs £2,000 a time to ask parliamentary questions for him, established the House of Commons Committee on Standards. This is the committee that is supposed to advise the prime minister on ethical standards, the one that Johnson tried to tear down to defend Owen Paterson, who was paid £500,000 by two companies for whom he lobbied, Randox and Lynn’s Country Foods.
Johnson’s attempts to defend Paterson ultimately failed – but MPs’ second jobs are a symptom of a much deeper corruption, particularly in the Conservative party. Some 90 Conservative MPs have second jobs in consultancy or as directors, compared with three Labour MPs. The pernicious influence of money in British politics has seldom been so blatant, from the erstwhile housing secretary Robert Jenrick overturning a planning decision to profit a developer who then donated to the Tory party, to the £2.1bn in PPE or Covid testing contracts awarded to companies with links to the party.
For centuries, MPs were unpaid. Campaigners such as the Chartists argued, with some justification, that this meant that politics would remain the preserve of the wealthy. Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government eventually voted for a £400 annual salary in 1911. Now, however, the House of Commons has become a place where many go to seek their fortune.
This article was amended on 12 November 2021. The Nolan inquiry established the House of Commons Committee on Standards, not the Committee on Standards in Public Life as an earlier version said.