It was reported this week that Rishi Sunak has moved offices to Mayfair from a shared workspace in Kensington.
It got the Pygge thinking – how does he afford it while carrying on as full-time MP for Richmond? Well there’s the family wealth from wife Akshata, of course, as well as his own piggy bank savings from his days as a banker.
But Sunak has also started getting serious windfalls from his side-hustle as a corporate and after-dinner speaker. It turns out companies will pay big money to book a former Prime Minister, even one who led his party to its worst defeat in two centuries.
The Pygge has discovered that just this month Sunak was paid a lump sum of £141,000 by NDTV, an Indian media conglomerate, after he gave a speech to them.
The engagement took up five hours of Sunak’s time. So he was making £470 a minute. Nice work if you can get it.
Earlier this year Sunak received similar bungs: £160,000 for three hours with Bain Capital, £156,000 for two and a half hours with Makena, a California-based capital management firm and £188,000 for four hours with a South Korean media company.
The former PM advertises his services with the Washington Speakers Bureau, an American firm that has been raking it in for decades by working as a booker for former politicians. The firm says it “believes in the transformative power of real-world human connections”.
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