Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw have both been caught out trying to moonlight. As Tory millionaire MP Adam Afriyie told Newsnight on Monday: “You can’t expect an MP to scrabble around on a salary of £67,000.”
Meanwhile, another Tory MP, Andrew Rosindell, has suggested that Labour’s Rachel Reeves she shouldn’t be allowed to go on maternity leave if she is a member of the cabinet after the election. So if a woman MP shouldn’t be allowed to be a mother and a male MP shouldn’t be allowed to make a quick £5K a day out of their contacts, what else shouldn’t an MP do? Here are five second jobs they really should avoid.
1. Doctor
It’s often said parliament benefits from having MPs with experience of the real world. This is all very well until it is your doctor who is an MP and you can only get an appointment on Friday afternoons and your emergency surgery is postponed whenever the party whip calls. So much for continuity of care. I prefer my doctors to be concentrating on the day job.
2. Charity worker
An MP is never going to make £5K a day working for a charity. You only get that much working for a bank or a dodgy regime. Given that you want your MP to be spending as much time as possible working on constituency and parliamentary duties, it makes no sense for him or her to waste a great deal of your time by working for peanuts.
3. Novelist
Jeffrey Archer has done it. Douglas Hurd has done it. Louise Mensch has done it. Nadine Dorries has done it. But you wish they hadn’t. Publishers have been all too willing to indulge the vanity and literary pretensions of MPs; a total ban on any MP writing fiction would be a huge benefit to society. This is one of the few occasions when I’d gladly pay an MP to do nothing.
4. Hairdresser
It’s hard to think of any MP with a decent haircut. Indeed, most MPs seem to go out of their way to cultivate a hair style that makes them look at best dull and at worst plain weird. These are not people you would want to put in charge of your own hair.
5. Waiter
For people who profess devotion to public service, most MPs are remarkably sharp-elbowed. Few waste an opportunity to push themselves forward. A dinner where an MP was waiting on you would be one that ended up being all about them rather than you.
And one job you would like your MP to do:
Accountant
If you’re looking to reduce your tax bill, there is no one better placed than an MP to know where all the best loopholes are. What’s more, your MP can guarantee that the only downside to your getting caught evading tax is being asked to pay some of it back. Now that’s a public service.
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