Boris Johnson is raking in an astonishing £21,000 an hour in work from lucrative speaking gigs outside of politics, it has emerged.
His successor Liz Truss, at No 10 for only six weeks, has the highest hourly rate of any current MP – making a mammoth £15,000 per hour.
Rishi Sunak’s immediate predecessor is also enjoying huge payments for her speaking work, handed £80,000 for a recent speech in Taiwan on the threat posed by China.
The typical rate for MPs’ second jobs is now £233 per hour, according to Sky News analysis of earnings outside of parliament.
The huge sum is around 17 times the country’s average hourly earnings, and 22 times higher than Britain’s minimum hourly wage.
Fresh questions have been raised about the MPs’ work outside parliament after it was revealed that they have made more than £17m from second jobs since the 2019 election.
Tory MP Douglas Ross, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, was shown to work the highest number of hours outside parliament – clocking up 3,869 hours as a football referee for the Scottish Football Association since the last election.
Fellow Tory Sir Geoffrey Cox – the barrister who has made more than £2m from his legal work since the 2019 election – tallied up the longest time in private sector by working 2,565 hours.
The highest number of hours outside of parliament by a Labour MP is the shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, who has worked almost 1,000 hours for dozens of different organisations.
Sir Keir Starmer has said that Labour would support a crack down on second jobs for MPs to stop lobbying scandals – but he has said there would be “exceptions” and changes would need cross-party support.
Deputy leader Angela Rayner, setting out Labour’s plan to overhaul standards on Thursday, acknowledged it would still involve “a role for the prime minister” – but promised greater powers for an independent ethics watchdog.
The Labour proposals for a new standards watchdog, which were first announced by the party in 2021, also include a ban on former ministers lobbying or carrying out paid work relating to their old roles for at least five years.
Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, asked whether changes should be made to the way MPs declare their outside hours to show how much time they are taking away from parliament.
She said a speech “given in Chicago or Calcutta, it’s an hour-and-a-half of the speech, but actually you were away from the country quite a long time”, adding: “So if we want to say how available are you as an MP, the system is really not very good for that.”