Desperate times, desperate measures. Climbing from 245th to 238th on the rich list may not qualify as desperate to all readers, but it does to Rishi Sunak. His net worth having actually slimmed by £11m last year to a worrying £640m, Sunak has returned to Goldman Sachs, where he first worked as an intern in the hazy days of Gordon Brown’s boom. Now Sunak – who is still an MP – is in the boardroom, as a senior adviser. He probably won’t have to make anyone a coffee. Who knows – he may even earn enough to buy an umbrella.
Actually he won’t. In fact, Sunak is donating his pay to the Richmond Project, the charity he and his wife created to improve numeracy skills in the UK.
He hardly needs the dosh. The furlough scheme that first endeared Sunak to the nation has dried up for the hoi polloi, but flows on handsomely for ex-PMs. They – and this includes Liz Truss – may claim up to £115,000 annually in public duties.
But it turns out that if Sunak had claimed any such moolah, it would have less furlough, more jobseekers’ allowance. Other supports, too, may have aided his successful application. It may be that the homeless man he was filmed asking about business in December 2022 has come good with some belated advice.
Sunak never stopped admiring the Wall Street elite. Soon after declaring the general election last year, Sunak put JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon forward for a UK honour. Dimon’s pay in 2024 was said to be $39m.
Hiring Sunak goes against the grain at Goldman Sachs, though. In March, the bank announced it would be laying off 3-5 per cent of its staff. Even for those that remain, junior employees once complained, in 2021, of 100-hour working weeks. Yikes!
But those are eager young graduates, dreaming of buying a studio flat inside the M25. This has never been about the money for Rishi. We know from the time he couldn’t use a contactless card at a petrol station in March 2022 that he doesn’t know much about spending the stuff anyway. Finance was always the passion. Downing Street was the sabbatical.
Like Nick Clegg’s X profile mentioning his career at Meta before his deputy premiership, leading our nation may end up being no more than a petty asterisk on Rishi’s LinkedIn. After graduating from Oxford University, Sunak first went to Goldman Sachs, then on to two hedge funds. He worked in business for the first 15 years of his career.
His political innings is unlikely to last so long. Sunak entered the Commons in 2015. It is not known if he will fight a seat at the next general election. He could if he wanted to: his rural Richmond and Northallerton seat enjoyed the largest Tory margin of victory across all constituencies at the last election. But it was reported in the scurrilous right-wing blog Pimlico Journal today that broadsword-bearing Boudica, Penny Mordaunt, has recently acquired a home there. En garde!
At this stage in British politics, Sunak’s new gig would have provoked no more than mild reaction, even had he kept the cash for himself. When Tony Blair earned more than £12m in the year after he left office, the country felt betrayed. The historian Alwyn Turner noted that Blair’s disgrace “had a tragic, almost mythic, element to it, because so many had made an emotional investment in him”. But since then, slipping from filthy power to filthy lucre has become the cursus honorum’s standard off-ramp. The revolving door revolves. Then revolves again.
[See also: Let the non-doms leave]
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