The MPs earning millions from second jobs

MPs have raked in more than £17m from second jobs over the past three years, according to a new database that lists payments to politicians and associated bodies across Westminster.

The Westminster Accounts tool, a joint venture by Tortoise Media and Sky News, collects information about MPs’ second jobs, donations and memberships of all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) in one place for the first time. This means it is now “possible to create leader boards and league tables showing where the largest sums flow from and to”, said Tortoise.

It reveals that two-thirds of extra earnings, which are in addition to the base annual parliamentary salary of £84,144, went to just 20 MPs mainly from the Conservative Party.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“The revelations reignited the debate around clamping down on whether it is justifiable for MPs to have second jobs following the Owen Paterson lobbying scandal,” reported the Daily Mail. From March this year MPs will be banned from taking on work as political or parliamentary consultants, “but speeches, TV appearances and legal work will still be fair game”, said the paper.

Is it mostly Tory MPs?

The vast majority of the £17.2m earned from second jobs since the last general election in December 2019 – £15.2m – went to Tory MPs, analysis found, “dwarfing the combined income of politicians who represent other parties”, said The Guardian.

It means that while just 54% of MPs are Conservatives, they account for 89% of external income over the last three years.

Leading the list is former prime minister Theresa May, who has been paid £2.5m for speaking engagements since 2019. That includes speeches to US firms such as JP Morgan and a six-figure fee for a speech in Saudi Arabia and is nine times more than she earned in her two years at No.10.

It is also more than double what her successor Boris Johnson has earned since he left Downing Street last summer, “although he is expected to overtake her soon”, reported Tortoise.

The two former prime ministers are among 25 MPs who have earned more outside parliament since the last general election than from their salaries, while a larger group of 36 MPs have earned more than £100,000 outside parliament overall in the same period.

What about the other parties?

By comparison, Labour MPs earned a combined £1.2m from outside work, while Liberal Democrat MPs took an additional £171,000 and SNP MPs banked £149,000.

The highest earning Labour MP was the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, who has earned £202,599 since the start of the current parliament.

The Telegraph reported that income declared by the MP for Tottenham came from more than 40 sources, including speaking engagements at Black History Month events, hosting regular radio shows on LBC and giving a talk at an American university about the war in Ukraine.

However, the paper hinted at hypocrisy on the part of Labour, after leader Keir Starmer urged the government to “ban all second jobs for MPs, with limited exceptions” in the wake of the Owen Paterson scandal. In addition, Lammy has criticised other MPs for lucrative second jobs, insisting he earned a “fraction” of their money.

Starmer defended Lammy on Sky News, saying: “I think David does a lot of media work, and I think media work and writing books is all part of the political process. But there’s a discussion to be had, I was urging the whole House of Commons to agree new rules because I do think we should get rid of second jobs with some exceptions.”

“Starmer himself received about £26,000 from legal work conducted while a serving Labour MP but before he became leader of the opposition,” claimed The Guardian.

The Top 10 MPs who earned the most from second jobs since December 2019 are all Conservatives:

1. Theresa May (Former PM and Conservative MP for Maidenhead): £2.55m

2. Geoffrey Cox (Former attorney general and Conservative MP for Torridge & West Devon): £2.19m

3. Boris Johnson: (Former PM and Conservative MP for Uxbridge and West Ruislip) £1.06m

4. Fiona Bruce (Conservative MP for Congleton): £711,749

5. John Redwood (Conservative MP for Wokingham): £692,438

6. Andrew Mitchell (Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield): £652,796

7. Sajid Javid (Former chancellor and Conservative MP for Bromsgrove): £361,566

8. Sir John Hayes (Conservative MP for South Holland and The Deepings): £337,862

9. Sir Bill Wiggin (Conservative MP for North Herefordshire): £253,389

10. Chris Grayling (Conservative MP for Epsom and Ewell): £224,487