Show him the money! As we’ve explained before, once an MP is out of government, they can do pretty much whatever they want for money. There’s a body, set up 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… Continue reading The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part two

Radlett Wire

Steve Bowbrick

The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part two

APR 18, 2025-1 MIN
Radlett Wire

The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part two

APR 18, 2025-1 MIN

Description

Show him the money!

Bundles of five- and ten-pound notes wrapped in white paper bands

As we’ve explained before, once an MP is out of government, they can do pretty much whatever they want for money. There’s a body, set up 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 and Boris Johnson).

Sir Oliver Dowden has now left ministerial office twice – once while in government and once because of last year’s massive 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 assault on reality) and with art broker Pierce Protocols (which does business under the name Heni Leviathan).

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality

There’s more money involved this time, though. Dowden has spent almost his entire Parliamentary career getting by on his MP’s salary and then – once appointed in 2018 – the larger ministerial salary (there was a short burst of outside work while he was 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 and that – especially in the company of Tory MPs who have been known to pull down nearly a million pounds per year from one second job or a million pounds in one month from various sources – his income so far barely touches the sides.

Sir Oliver’s 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, it brings our MP’s total declared income to £331,346 per year. While in his ministerial role in the last Tory government he 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.

San Diego FC 0-0 St Louis City

The most intriguing declaration in Sir Oliver’s latest update to the register is not the most valuable: it’s a trip to a football match. This football match wasn’t down at Meadow Park, Borehamwood, though, it was at the Snapdragon Stadium in sunny San Diego, 5,500 miles from his Hertsmere constituency, 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 complicated. We don’t pretend to understand all this but the club is an ‘extension team‘ that just won the right to play in the MLS (Major League Soccer) by demonstrating that it has the necessary financial backing. This backing – $500M – comes from Mohamed Mansour, a British-Egyptian billionaire who was Treasurer of the Conservative Party until his resignation last year. Mansour gave the party £5M in 2023 and was subsequently knighted by Rishi Sunak. Mansour, who used to be known as ‘Mansour Chevrolet’ back in Egypt because he and his family made their fortune from representing Western brands in the region, was Egyptian transport minister between 2005 and 2009, when he resigned his post after a serious 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 (San Diego are playing Charlotte in the MLS on Sunday. You can watch it on Apple TV+).