Name: After-dinner speaking.
Appearance: At parties, conferences, weddings, bar mitzvahs …
Cost: Somewhere between £500 and £200,000 per speech.
You mean people will actually pay £200,000 to hear you speak after you’ve had dinner? Yes, and they’ll throw in the dinner for free.
Wow! In that case tell them I’ll do it for £199,000. I’m free most nights, except when MasterChef is on. Ah. I didn’t mean they would pay you personally. They prefer people who are famous and good at it.
That’s just discrimination against talentless nobodies. How do I get the gig? Become prime minister, ideally.
How about a plan B, just in case? Become chancellor of the exchequer.
Good. That’s much more realistic. How much can I expect? Well, according to the Register of MPs’ interests, in October George Osborne was paid £81,174 for one speech by the investment bank JP Morgan in New York. And they paid him £60,578 for another one.
He must have been having a sale. Yes, although the cheapest paid speech that Osborne declared for October or November was an hour of him talking to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. That cost just £28,454.
Kerr-razy Black Friday bargains! It must have been. Altogether, two months he earned more than £500,000 from talking to Americans.
Isn’t he still an MP, elected by the people of Tatton and paid approximately £74,000 a year to work on their behalf and represent their interests? That’s right.
And making himself even richer in America does that how, exactly? Oh, I’m sure he could explain. Besides, everyone gives speeches. Nick Clegg was said to charge about £35,000 after the coalition ended. Ken Livingstone was paid £8,000 for a speech to a hedge fund in 2008. Gordon Brown has earned up to £75,000 per speech, although he gives the money to his charity. David Cameron gave a speech at DePauw University in Indiana just the other day, but we don’t know what he was paid.
Who makes the £200,000 then? Well, he’s a pretty straight sort of guy …
Oh no. That’s right! To show you throw only the finest parties, book Tony Blair.
Do say: “I thought bankers preferred after-dinner coke and Cristal?”
Don’t say: “Nah, that looks cheap.”
