After years of criticism, the Whitehall body that regulates the revolving door between those in public office and subsequent private earnings is to be scrapped.
Described as “toothless” in a 2017 parliamentary report, the effectiveness of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) was greatly limited by the rules set by the government on former ministers and senior civil servants. Those rules were deemed “dead in the water, next to useless, utterly pointless and in need of reform” by Acoba’s final chair, the Conservative peer Eric Pickles.
Acoba was unable to do more than publish letters and recommend against honours or future public appointments for those it found had breached the rules. In one instance published this month, Lord Pickles admitted: “There are currently no consequences of sanctions for breaches of the government’s rules.”
Keir Starmer’s promised changes will see former ministers and senior civil servants asked to return severance payments in the case of any breaches, and the functions of Acoba are to be split between the prime minister’s independent adviser on ministerial standards and the Civil Service Commission.
Pickles told MPs in June that “most of the breaches are by the befuddled and the confused” – which he found deeply worrying given that many of them had been running the government just weeks before – but others were more brazen.
Boris Johnson
Fool me once In July 2018, Boris Johnson, then the foreign secretary, quit Theresa May’s government and signed a contract as a Daily Telegraph columnist three days later, for £275,000 a year. He then asked Acoba to retroactively approve an application. The committee declined to do so, and noted Johnson was supposed to have waited three months (not three days) after leaving office before taking up a new role. Nothing happened.
Fool me twice In June 2023, now a former prime minister, Johnson wrote to Acoba to ask for permission to join the Daily Mail as a columnist. Half an hour later, the appointment was announced. This was, Acoba found, an “unambiguous breach” of the rules. Nothing happened.
Fool me … thrice? In April 2024, Acoba published correspondence describing Johnson as “evasive”, that he “avoided answering specific questions” and that he had “refused to be open” about his relationship with a hedge fund, Merlyn Advisors, on whose behalf he met the Venezuelan president. Nothing happened.
Dominic Cummings
Johnson’s former chief adviser became a Substack blogger in June 2021 after his exit from Downing Street, while offering himself up as a consultant. Acoba found Cummings had breached the rules by failing to seek its advice before starting the blog. The committee said he had failed to cooperate and later refused to consider an application he made in September 2021 to act as a consultant for Babylon Health.
The government took an unusually long 14 months to respond to Acoba’s letter notifying them of the breach, responding only in the final days of Johnson’s government.
Cummings, for his part, told the government this year that the Cabinet Office “got into the habit of writing fake [Acoba] letters to me and briefing them to the Mirror without even sending them to me”, as part of a refusal to cooperate with a freedom of information request.
George Osborne
Before his pivot to podcasts, Osborne joined the Evening Standard as its editor in March 2017, four days after submitting his application to Acoba. Acoba found it to be a “matter of regret” that the former chancellor’s latest job was announced so soon after it received his application, before it had the chance to provide advice. This followed Osborne’s failure to seek the committee’s advice before announcing a different role as chair of the Northern Powerhouse in October 2016.
Despite Osborne having already signed his contract with the newspaper, the committee rubber-stamped his role as editor.
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