In which we ask what happens to an MP’s priorities when three quarters of his income comes from his second (and third) jobs?

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Show him the money!</figcaption></figure>

UPDATE: 20 April 2025: Sir Oliver’s new favourite football team San Diego FC got absolutely clattered 3-0 at Charlotte, finishing with ten men after some VAR drama. And it was a very long flight home for the San Diego boys. Not quite as long as Sir Oliver’s back in March, though, obviously. Watch the match highlights.

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As we’ve explained before, once an MP is out of government, they can do pretty much whatever they want to earn money. There’s a body, set up and funded by Parliament, called the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), that tells ministers what they may and may not do on leaving office but it essentially boils down to “wait for a few months…”. ACOBA has no way of stopping a former minister or senior civil servant from taking up a new role but has been known to write a stern letter (see the cases of Sue Gray, who actually did what they told her to do, and Boris Johnson, who didn’t).

Sir Oliver Dowden has now left ministerial office twice – once while in government and once because of last year’s general election defeat. On each occasion he did the right thing, asked ACOBA for advice and was told to wait three months before taking up his new roles. You won’t be surprised to learn that, in both cases, he waited exactly three months before starting his new jobs.

Dowden is nothing if not loyal and it turns out that the work he’s taken up this time around is with the same employers as last time around (we wrote about them back then). He’s back with ‘global macro hedge fund’ Caxton Associates (intriguingly, the people who funded Liz Truss’s petulant insurgency) and with art broker Pierce Protocols (doing business under the name Heni Leviathan which seems sort of appropriate when you consider the modern Tory Party’s commitment to reducing the nation to a state of nature).

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality</figcaption></figure>

There’s more money involved this time, though. Dowden has spent almost his entire Parliamentary career getting by on his MP’s salary plus – once appointed in 2018 – the larger ministerial salary (there was about a month of outside work while he was briefly out of the cabinet in 2022) but now that he’s free to do so he’s dialing up the dough.

Again, it seems important to note that Dowden’s behaviour here is not exceptional: in the 2019 Parliament over 90% of income from second jobs went to Tory MPs – some of whom have been known to pull down nearly a million pounds per year from one second job or £2.5M in one Parliament or, in the case of the acknowledged master of the art of the second job, Boris Johnson, a million pounds from multiple jobs in one month. Sir Oliver’s income, so far, barely touches the sides.

His most recent declaration says that he’s now pulling down a total of £20,000 per month from the above sources (£10,000 from each). That’s 2.5x his MP’s salary and, added up, brings Dowden’s total declared income to £331,346 per year. At the top we wondered, in the sub-head, what happens to an MP’s priorities when this kind of money starts to flow into the bank account, making the sums coming from the day job look a bit silly. Well, of course, we don’t know. And we definitely don’t know what effect all this new money is going to have on Sir Oliver Dowden in particular. We do know that he’s been a professional and diligent representative for his Hertsmere electors for almost ten years – making speeches next to bins without complaint.

So, in a sense, what we’ve got now, with Sir Oliver out of office and finally bring in the big money, is a kind of experiment: what happens when you give an elected representative a boost to his earnings equivalent to 2.5 times his basic salary and 6.5x the average wage in the UK? Is it possible that all that wedge will have no effect at all? Is it even slightly plausible that his priorities will not shift? That he won’t find himself thinking more favourably of his main employer and acting in their interests or in the interests, more broadly, of the business they’re in?

While in his ministerial role in the last Tory government Dowden was earning around £150,000 per year (and he’ll have received a severance payment of £16,876 on leaving that job last year). There must be a measure of relief for Sir Oliver in finally being able to join the high earners’ club. For his whole political career he’s been surrounded by the super-rich. The generation of Tory MPs he’s a member of is one of the wealthiest in history and he was usually in a tiny minority of non-millionaires in the cabinets in which he sat. The fact that, as a diligent bagman, he often wound up on Sunday morning TV defending the indefensible behaviour of his millionaire colleagues must have been especially galling.

<figure class="wp-block-video"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">San Diego FC 0-0 St Louis City</figcaption></figure>

But let’s get to the most intriguing declaration in Sir Oliver’s latest update to the register. It’s not the most valuable – it’s a trip to a football match – but this football match wasn’t down at Meadow Park in sunny Borehamwood. It was at the Snapdragon Stadium in sunny San Diego, 5,500 miles further West, on 1 March. We assume Dowden travelled with his family. At least it’s difficult to imagine how he could have spent £9,217.79 on flights and £1,851.27 on accommodation on his own (plus £462.81 for transfers and £617.12 for match tickets and hospitality). This is another benefit of being out of government: you can stock up on freebies without the kind of examination that government ministers get when they go to the football.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"></figure>

This particular football match was the inaugural home match of a club called San Diego FC. American football soccer is weird. We don’t pretend to understand all this but the club is an ‘extension team‘ that just won a place in the MLS (Major League Soccer) by demonstrating that it has the necessary financial backing. This backing – $500M of it – comes from the man who flew Sir Oliver out for the match, Sir Mohamed Mansour, a British-Egyptian billionaire who was a treasurer of the Conservative Party until his resignation last year. Mansour’s business <a hr