The latest update to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests is now online. Suella Braverman is £100,000 richer after spending 200 hours handcuffed to Katie Price for Channel 4’s Celebrity Handcuffed. Elsewhere in her entry, a PR firm forked out £800 for 40 copies of her book, while the Prosperity Institute covered her £6,990 launch party…
Rishi Sunak’s diary is filling up nicely. Private equity firm Hg Capital paid him £113,104.76 for one speaking engagement lasting four hours. An hourly rate of more than £28,000…
Tom Tugendhat has found himself a pair of advisory roles worth roughly £79,000 a year. Washington’s Fortius Global wants eight hours a month for $72,000, and Paris-based Latour Capital is paying €30,000 for just 42 hours annually…
Sharon Hodgson, who chairs the APPG on Ticket Abuse, accepted £4,000 of tickets to An Evening with Barack Obama, an event she says let her meet people with “similar ticketing concerns”. Jim McMahon was also there, courtesy of the Co-op…
Rachel Reeves, who spent two years battering small businesses, farmers, young workers, the self-employed, and pensioners as Chancellor, accepted a £550 portrait of herself at the despatch box. At least someone looks back on those moments fondly…
Last but not least, Mark Pritchard’s trip to a security forum in Doha came with £18,218 of flights, paid for by the Soufan Center. Someone’s flying at the front…
As always, nice work if you can get it…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”