In which we ask what happens to an MP’s priorities when three quarters of his income comes from his second (and third) jobs?
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 (in other news, they have VAR in the MLS). And it’s 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.
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).
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 pulling down 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?
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.
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.
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 gave the party £5M in 2023 and was subsequently knighted by Rishi Sunak. He used to be known as ‘Mansour Chevrolet’ back in Egypt because his dad made the family’s fortune by representing Western brands in the region. Sir Mohamed was Egyptian transport minister between 2005 and 2009, but had to resign his post after taking responsibility for a disastrous train crash.
To be honest, none of this really explains why you’d want to fly a Tory Party backbencher 11,000 miles for a football match. We wondered if Dowden could have appointed Mansour to his treasurer role while he was Co-Chairman of the party but Dowden was no longer in that role when Mansour came in. Any ideas?
- More about ACOBA and the register of members’ interests in this 2022 post and here’s a very good ACOBA explainer from the Institute for Government.
- Sir Oliver is still on the front benches – he currently shadows the Deputy Prime Minister – but shadow ministerial roles don’t attract any of the customary limits on outside activity and only the leader of the opposition gets any kind of additional payment for the role. The ministerial code doesn’t apply to shadow ministers.
- In principle, the current government opposes the whole idea of second jobs. Before the general election Keir Starmer enthusiatically supported legislation to limit MPs’ second jobs – his manifesto proposes “…an immediate ban on MPs from taking up paid advisory or consultancy roles,” which would obviously put the kybosh on Sir Oliver’s two main gigs. Things have gone a bit quiet since then, though, and we find this a bit puzzling: banning second jobs looks like a political slam-dunk for Labour. It would affect almost exclusively Conservative MPs; it would present a real practical problem for the big earners and a big political problem for the Tory front bench; and it’s been shown to be immensely popular with the electorate. Is there a tactical concern here that a wave of big Conservative resignations might produce some inconvenient by-election results and a few more ReformUK MPs on the opposition benches? Quite possibly.
- Mohamed Mansour wrote about his ambitions for his new football club for a local San Diego paper in March. Next for San Diego is Charlotte FC away. We assume new fan Oliver Dowden will be watching on Apple TV+.
- The administration of the Conservative Party is a complex matter and we’re not experts but it seems important to note that Mansour was never actually the capital-t Treasurer of the party (which explains why he’s not on this list), only ever a lower-case treasurer of the party. The Conservative Party acquires treasurers of this kind in a pretty spontaneous way and each will have a specific responsibility, depending on their wealth or their network. Mansour’s was to raise money to fight the 2024 general election. This presumably explains why he disappeared sharpish right after that historic defeat.
- We read that Nadhim “Tax Error” Zahawi asked Mansour to fund a bid for the Telegraph last year but that he swerved that one. Very wise.
- Back when he was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Dowden oversaw the Cabinet Office’s 22-person Propriety and Ethics team. Just saying.
- We think it might be worth looking a bit more closely at the two businesses currently providing about 75% of Sir Oliver’s income between them – Caxton Associates and Pierce Protocols. Watch this space.
- From the Politico politics blog, five MPs who really couldn’t muster even a single fuck about the advice of ACOBA.
- Here’s part one of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor which, to be honest, is even less interesting than part two. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You. Here’s all of our Oliver Dowden coverage on one page and if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to this feed. We tweet this stuff and you’ll also find us in the Fediverse – search Mastodon for ‘Radlett Wire’.
