Via a survey carried out for LondonlovesBusiness.com comes this list of the top five London MPs for annual outside earnings on top of their MP salary of £65,738:
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, MP for Kensington (Con) – upwards of £240,000
Nick Raynsford, MP for Greenwich and Woolwich (Lab) – £60,657
Mark Field, MP for Cities of London and Westminster (Con) – £41,740
Jo Johnson, MP for Orpington (Con) – £12,314
Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Lab) – £10,326
What do you think of these figures: good to see MPs having a range of activities or bad to see MPs spending time earning these sorts of sums?
A survey has uncovered the outside interests of dozens of MPs who hold down paid positions, ranging from legal and media work to crofting, and even grave digging. One earns £750 an hour for helping to organise an awards ceremony for the drinks industry, while another is paid more than £1,300 a day to provide business advice.
Among the highest earners is Nick Raynsford, the former housing minister, who collected £148,000 from six private-sector jobs last year, mostly connected to housing, and John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP, who receives more than £200,000 a year from his computer software company.
John Hemming pre-empted the story about himself by a week with a detailed post on his blog:
I am a full time politician, but I remain a director of two companies that I founded and also other businesses that run through as John Hemming Trading. My working week is around 70 hours a week. I spend about 4 hours a month chairing John Hemming & Co LLP. This means that over 98% of my time is spent on political issues.
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