Voices: The Tories can’t lean on cost of living when Boris earns 21k an hour

Given his flair for publicity – not all of it good – you may by now be familiar with the boorish Conservative MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson.

Mr Anderson, who tells the poor to get by on 30p a meal, once remarked on Facebook that “I don’t have a second job, I love the job I have already. We are paid handsomely for the job we do and if you need an extra £100,000 a year on top then you should really be looking for another job.”

While he was talking at the time about how MPs shouldn’t make financial gain from private companies in return for lobbying, it seems a little ironic that he now has a second job himself on GB News, a fringe alt-right TV channel, for which he is likely well paid.

He was last seen feeding cat food to former Apprentice star, successful businessperson and fellow northerner Michelle Dewberry. I’m sure each and every one of his constituents in Nottinghamshire were impressed with that particular engagement in the democratic process. Anderson, who was once a coal miner, obviously still believes in hard graft.

Many of his fellow MPs – mostly Tories, but in other parties too – share his arguably hypocritical taste for moonlighting from the job the taxpayer funds them so handsomely to do, ie full time. The latest Sky News survey, in its Westminster Accounts series, highlights just how lucrative such work can be.

Perhaps a little mischievously, but forgivably, they’ve also assigned an hourly rate to some of these (openly declared) earnings and, based on their monetary value, come up with the fairly depressing finding that Liz Truss is on the equivalent of £15,700 per hour for knocking out her unremarkable advice on the state of the world.

That’s actually quite good value then, considering the £51m an hour she cost the taxpayer as a result of accidentally blowing up the gilts market last year (based on a £30bn loss, and Liz working flat out for 12 hours on each of her 49 days in office). That includes the £20,000 per hour she clocked up going to Taiwan to tell them what they wanted to hear.

Less shocking (though even more egregious) is Boris Johnson, who is on £21,882 per hour, which as we all know handily went to paying for a nice, £4m mansion in the countryside and the school fees for eligible offspring.

Rather less famous, though the one I find especially intriguing, is Fiona Bruce. Not “that” Fiona Bruce, of Antiques Roadshow and embattled Question Time presenter fame. She’s only on about £400,000 from the BBC for her broadcasting activities, which is plenty. No, I’m on about Fiona Bruce MP, the honourable and presumably well-off member for Congleton in Cheshire.

According to Sky, the 35 donations, gifts, payments and other benefits Ms Bruce has declared so far are worth the equivalent of approximately £834,700 since December 2019. That’s around £240,000 per annum, pro rata, plus the backbencher salary of £84,000, plus the allowances, subsidised bars and restaurants and various other perks.

Some of our most “valuable” MPs don’t even spend that much time in parliament. The accomplished novelist Nadine Dorries, MP at the time of writing for Mid Bedfordshire, has spent relatively little time in the Commons. She does, however, have a regular talk show on Talk TV (undisclosed fee) and is soon to bring out yet another book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson (undisclosed advance).

The book is described as a “profoundly shocking story of powerful, unaccountable forces operating behind the scenes who became the architects of a prime minister’s downfall.” Like Hugh Trevor-Roper’s meticulously researched The Last Days of Hitler, or Woodward and Bernstein on the end of the Nixon presidency, it’s bound to become a classic of the downfall genre.

I digress, but the point is that some of our elected representatives seem to be in it far too obviously for themselves, and the taxpayer is entitled to ask questions – especially at a time when the average person is struggling to pay their mortgage, heat their home or even feed themselves.

As we are about to discover, they also treat themselves to a six-week break in the summer, plus a few weeks each more at Easter, May, Whitsun and Christmas. No doubt much constituency work is done in these holidays, as well as unmissable fact-finding trips abroad – but it is far, far away from the normal working arrangements of their hard-pressed constituents.

MPs’ pensions are on generous final salary terms – a rarer luxury now – and their pay set by an independent but sympathetic review body, and far distant from market forces. Needless to add, it is unrelated to performance. Even with a volatile electorate, they enjoy more job security than most and, with still-substantial housing subsidies, don’t need to concern themselves overmuch about the inflation, mortgage rates and cost of living crisis they preside over. The “Westminster Bubble” is a cliche, but there is a little too much detachment and entitlement going on.

At a time when the lamentable behaviour of certain MPs is again under scrutiny, it would do them and those they serve much good if things were standardised. They should be given something resembling a contract of employment, attendance requirements, normal leave entitlement (of, say, four weeks a year), and money purchase pensions.

They should also be made accountable to an independent regulator – a kind of parliamentary HR department – which could also deal with the “issues” that sometimes arise with the handsy and the frisky.

Or they can keep riding the gravy train, and raking in the cash. Which do you think they’ll choose?