The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part four

Two years, £435,250, five employers and a lot of Abu Dhabi. We’ve finally put Sir Oliver’s second (and third, and fourth…) jobs in a spreadsheet

We don’t post very often and when we do, these days, it’s mostly to update the Sir Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor, a project which has become, over the last couple of years, a kind of rolling log of our MP’s outside income. And, if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll remember that this all began at the exact moment it became legit for Sir Oliver to accept money from hedge funds and finance companies and, er, art advisory firms, three months after he and his party left office in 2024.

We’ve complained here before – at some length, sorry – that the Register of Members’ Financial Interests is a Byzantine maze of PDFs. But it turns out we were a bit out of date because, quietly, Parliament has built a proper database behind the register and it has an API (so it can be queried automatically) and a downloadable spreadsheet for every edition published. It’s not exactly obvious – you’d never find it from Sir Oliver’s own page in the register – but it’s there and it’s actually pretty good. So, credit where it’s due.

What it means is that, for the first time, we’ve been able to pull every one of Sir Oliver’s entries from all 53 editions of the register published since March 2024 (which is as far back as the new, accessible database goes), remove the duplicates (each edition repeats everything still current and payments drop off after a year) and line them up. Our spreadsheet is here, and every row links back to the official record (this is a work in progress – if you see any errors or omissions, please let us know in the comments).

We’re bored saying this but it is important to note that Sir Oliver Dowden has broken no rules. In taking all of the outside money that we’ve been recording here he’s doing nothing wrong. And, in fact, all this scrutiny is only possible because everything below is declared, promptly and in detail, exactly as the rules require. Our MP took ACOBA’s advice when he left office (both times) and waited the standard three months (exactly) before taking paid work. He remains, by every account (and in our own experience) a diligent and responsive constituency MP. What follows is about scale, not about wrongdoing – and about whether you, as a Hertsmere voter, think this is what the job of your MP should involve.

The headline number

For most of Sir Oliver’s Parliamentary career he wasn’t able to earn anything from outside employers because he had a Ministerial or at least a Cabinet role in the then Conservative government. We suspect this explains the enthusiasm for outside work that he’s shown since leaving government. for tidiness, the numbers here leave out Sir Oliver’s short period off the leash when he resigned from his cabinet job in Boris Johnson’s government in June 2022, when he tested the waters with a short engagement with Caxton Associates, Liz Truss’s favourite macro hedge fund. More about that period (and Dowden’s first encounter with ACOBA) in this post from back then. So – diving into the new data – between his first outside payment in this period of freedom, on 8 November 2024, and the latest register (26 October 2026), Sir Oliver received £435,250 in cash for outside work. That’s 31 payments, from five employers, for 824 declared hours – an average of about £528 per hour.

For comparison, his MP’s salary over the same two years came to roughly £190,000. The basic salary rose to £98,599 in April – ‘higher levels of complex casework’, remember – but it is now very much the smaller of Sir Oliver’s income streams.

Employer	What they do	Received	Payments	Hours	£/hour
Heni (Pierce Protocols)	Art services / art investment	£180,000	18	360	£500
Caxton Associates	Global macro hedge fund	£135,000	6	270	£500
Francisco Partners	US tech investment firm	£103,750	5	166	£625
Man Capital	Mansour family investment firm	£12,500	1	20	£625
The Mentor Hub	Mentoring	£4,000	1	8	£500
Total		£435,250	31	824	£528

On top of the cash, tech investment firm Francisco Partners paid £9,017.87 for flights and accommodation so he could attend a conference in April 2026, which the rules require him to register as earnings too.

So, has it gone up?

We went into this expecting to see a continuation of Sir Oliver’s steady upward trend in income but that’s not what’s happened.

The fairest measure, and the easiest way to see the trend, is the rolling 12-month total – everything received in the previous year – because Sir Oliver’s payments arrive in lumps (Caxton paid £60,000 up front for six months’ advice in November 2024, for instance). On that measure his outside earnings climbed steadily from about £130,000 a year in mid-2025 to a peak of £262,500 in the 12 months to June 2026 – a little over 2.7 times his MP’s salary.

Since then it has dipped, to £225,250 in the 12 months to October 2026. The reason is simple: the Pierce Protocols (Heni) job appears to have ended. The register now shows an end date of 2 May 2026 for that role and the last £10,000 monthly payment arrived on 8 May (tbh, we still don’t quite understand what this ‘international art services business’ actually does so this simplifies things). The Francisco Partners work has also been lighter recently – £11,250 in September for two and a quarter days, against £35,000 for seven days back in January.

But a backbencher on the clock cannot stand still. In July he signed up as a paid mentor with The Mentor Hub (£4,000 for a day’s work), in October Caxton extended its arrangement until October 2028 and in September he started a new two-year role as strategic adviser to Man Capital LLP, a “global independent investment firm”, at £5,000 a day (£12,500 for two and a half days in October).

Man Capital is not, as the name might suggest, connected to the FTSE-listed hedge fund Man Group. The ‘Man’ is short for Mansour. Man Capital is the London investment arm of the Mansour family’s conglomerate, the Mansour Group, and its founder and chairman is Sir Mohamed Mansour. The address Sir Oliver gives for his new employer, 25 Berkeley Square, is Man Capital’s head office.

Regular readers will remember Sir Mohamed. He’s the former Conservative Party treasurer (lower-case t because he was only ever a kind of informal or honorary treasurer) and £5 million-donor who flew Sir Oliver 11,000 miles to San Diego in March 2025, at a cost of £12,148.99, to watch the first home match of San Diego FC. Sir Mohamed chairs the club, which is owned by Right to Dream, a football academy network that Man Capital took majority control of in 2021. In part two we asked why a billionaire would fly a Tory backbencher to California for a football match. We still don’t know, but 18 months later the same billionaire’s investment firm is paying him £5,000 a day for strategic advice – exactly the kind of pattern the register exists to make visible, so there you are.

Calendar years tell the same story: £175,000 in 2025, and £190,250 in 2026 so far with two months to go. So our hunch was half right. Sir Oliver’s outside income did rise substantially through 2025 and into 2026, and the day rate has gone up – the newer clients pay £625 an hour, against £500 from the originals. But it hasn’t been a straight line, and right now Sir Oliver is earning a little less than he was in the Spring.

A correction

In part three we said Sir Oliver’s annual income was “running at about £420,000”. We got there by taking the most recent payment from each employer and treating it as a monthly rate. With the full record in front of us, we can see that we overstated things – because, for instance, the Francisco Partners payments turned out to be irregular rather than monthly. On cash actually received, the best figure for the 12 months to March 2026 is £237,500 of outside earnings plus a salary of about £94,000 – so roughly £330,000. It has since peaked at around £357,000 (12 months to June). Still a lot of money. But not £420,000, and we do want to get this right.

The part-time question

Over the last 12 months Sir Oliver has declared 414 hours of outside work – about 35 hours a month or between three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half working days, depending on whose definition of a day you use (Heni and Caxton count ten hours; Francisco and Man Capital count eight). That’s lower than the ten days a month we estimated in part three, which was based on the employers’ stated maximums rather than the hours actually declared against each payment (and this explains why his hourly rate is higher than we originally estimated).

Freebies: the Gulf, grands prix and the Chelsea Flower Show

The other column of the register – gifts, hospitality and overseas visits – adds up to £89,679 since the July 2024 election. A few patterns stand out.

The UAE. In May 2025 Sir Oliver became chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the United Arab Emirates. Since then he has made three visits to Abu Dhabi:

• October 2025 – the UAE-UK Business Council plenary, paid for by the UAE Embassy (£7,250)
• December 2025 – speaker at the BRIDGE Summit (held on Yas Island, ‘a premier artificial leisure and entertainment destination’ in Abu Dhabi) paid for by the organisers, including ‘hospitality and access to the Formula 1 Grand Prix’ and a £250 gift box (£20,850 in total – the single most valuable item on his register)
• January 2026 – a cross-party APPG visit, paid for by the UAE Embassy (£13,645)

He also accepted Royal Enclosure hospitality at Ascot from the UAE Embassy (£510) and in September 2026 an Abu Dhabi-based firm, Mirablis Advisory, paid £7,251.52 for him to attend the Madrid Grand Prix (£5,711.99 of that was the ticket). Chairing an APPG involves exactly this kind of junket and it’s all declared but it is intriguing that the Gulf now has such a visible place in the professional life of the MP for Hertsmere. And it must, to say the least, be an interesting time to be so closely connected with the region.

Motorsport. Besides Abu Dhabi and Madrid, Heni flew Sir Oliver to the Bahrain Grand Prix in April 2025 (£7,347). That’s three Grands Prix in 18 months, none of them paid for by Sir Oliver.

Fenchurch Advisory Partners. This City corporate-finance firm is his most loyal host: Chelsea Flower Show gala tickets in 2023, 2025 (£3,300) and 2026 (£3,500), the Henley Festival in 2025 and 2026, and a “financial services delegation” to France in June 2025 (£2,075).

And, for completeness, there’s San Diego: the £12,149 trip to watch Sir Mohamed Mansour’s new football club that we wrote about in part two, and which now looks rather like the start of a professional relationship.

Updated: the list of sketchy behaviour that we first published in 2024:

Behaviour	When	Details
Sums totalling £82,741.09 for his office	2017 – 2022	Part one
£8,398 from a hedge fund	2022	Part one
£5,000 from an art services company	2022	Part one
£12,149 trip to San Diego courtesy of Mohamed Mansour	2025	Part two
£435,250 from five outside employers	Nov 2024 – Oct 2026	This post
Paid adviser to Man Capital, Sir Mohamed Mansour’s investment firm, at £5,000 a day	Sept 2026 –	This post
£42,255 of Abu Dhabi visits and UAE Embassy hospitality	2025 – 26	This post
Three Formula 1 Grands Prix, paid for by others	2025 – 26	This post

Still, as we’ve said before, hardly a morning’s work for a Boris Johnson. But two years into opposition, Sir Oliver has comfortably more than doubled his parliamentary income, and the people paying for his time and his travel are hedge funds, investment firms and Gulf monarchs.

How we did this

Every figure comes from the official Register of Members’ Financial Interests, downloaded from Parliament’s interests API for all 53 editions between 18 March 2024 and 26 October 2026. Payments are dated by when they were received, not when they were registered. In-kind payments are excluded from the cash totals. The breakthrough here, as you might have guessed, was using an agentic LLM to find and download the data via the Parliament API, analyse and de-dupe, add it all to a very useful dynamic spreadsheet and make the charts that you can see in this post. We’re as neurotic as you are about AI so we’ve checked and double-checked the data but please, if you see anything we’ve missed, any howlers, any errors or hallucinations, please do leave a comment and we’ll sort it sharpish. The full spreadsheet, including every gift, visit and role, is here.

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• Sir Oliver currently has no role in the Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet. There’d be nothing to stop him from taking all this outside work if he did, though, since, under the rules, an opposition MP, even if they have a shadow role, is still technically a backbencher.
• Here are parts one, two and three of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor and here’s all of our Dowden coverage, on one page. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You (also the best way to get in touch with your MP).