Kemi Badenoch and Mel Stride love to talk about “Labour’s jobs tax”, which is apparently grinding the economy to a halt and preventing employers from hiring. Happily, this tax does not seem to be affecting the job prospects of the pair’s former boss Rishi Sunak.
The former prime minister has just landed two new roles: one at Microsoft, where he will be providing “high-level strategic perspectives on macro-economic and geopolitical trends”, and the other at the $180bn AI startup Anthropic, which is one of the leaders in the artificial intelligence space. These are in addition to Sunak’s part-time job advising Goldman Sachs announced in July, his gigs on the lucrative global speech circuit (over £150,000 a go – nice work if you can get it), and of course his continued work as the MP for Richmond and Northallerton. Sunak has not quite reached the dizzying heights of another Tory chancellor George Osborne, who had four external roles when he was announced as editor of the Evening Standard while still MP for Tatton in March 2017. But it’s a close-run thing.
There are a couple of things to note about this. Much of the immediate response to the news has centred on the stern warnings of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), the watchdog for former ministers and government officials who want to take up outside appointments.
Its letter to Sunak regarding the Microsoft appointment details all the potential conflicts of interest (such as the tech giant’s contract with the UK government worth £1.4bn a year “to deliver digital transformation, adoption of AI and cloud services”) is 13 pages long, and includes the instruction that he refrain from offering advice on government work or contracts or use his contacts for lobbying purposes until he has been out of office for two years. The same applies to his work for Anthropic.
One wonders quite what these companies are paying a former prime minister for if not his insight into government policy and contact book. Then again, it’s not clear how valuable Sunak’s offering on either of those fronts is these days, with a Labour government that has markedly different priorities. As the Acoba Anthropic letter bluntly puts it: “Since you left office, there has been a change in government and a significant shift in the economic and geopolitical climate that no doubt has affected AI, a rapidly evolving area. It has now been 14 months since you last had access to information, creating a gap between you having access to privileged insight in office and taking up this role – reducing the likely currency of relevant information.” Ouch.
A more pertinent question on the subject of conflicts of interests would be to look at it from the other side and ask whether Sunak might have taken decisions as prime minister with an eye on his future job prospects. He was pretty fixated on promoting tech in general and AI in particular while in office. But the Sunak’s family vast personal wealth (let’s not forget that his wife is a billionaire) helps assuage suspicions that he acted out of financial self-interest. So does the fact he is donating his salary from these roles to his wife’s numeracy charity. Given everything we know about the man, his interests and his bank balance, it’s far more plausible that he focused on AI because he’s a tech-obsessed nerd who is really fascinated by AI. This is, after all, a man who’s last two big pitches as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom were more maths lessons and chess table in parks.
So if Sunak is unlikely to be able to use his (dwindling) influence to line the pockets of big tech, and if there’s little reason to suspect he himself was influenced by their chequebooks when in office, should we care about his burgeoning portfolio career? If you were a constituent of Richmond and Northallerton, you might. I happened to read the Sunak job news just after seeing this post from Beccy Cooper, Labour MP for Worthing West, outlining all the casework she did last month. The former PM must balance answering constituents’ queries about housing issues and access to local services and with advising global mega-companies on the state of the world. It’s not hard to guess which he’s likely to find more stimulating.
A broader issue is what this says about parliamentary careers and what we expect of our politicians. Sunak first entered parliament in 2015. Within a decade he had gone from rising star to chancellor to prime minister to failed opposition leader and back to backbench MP. That’s a dizzyingly fast trajectory. He’s a has-been at 45, unlikely to ever be a minister again unless his party and the UK electoral landscape change dramatically. It was widely assumed he’d quit politics soon after the election and jet off to Silicon Valley, as though the last few years in Westminster were just a bad dream. He surprised everyone by staying, and should probably be commended for that. David Cameron, whose rise was almost as meteoric (new MP to PM in eight and a half years), barely lasted three months on the backbenches after resigning as prime minister.
The political system we have ended up with encourages bright ambitious people to get involved young and then rise as quickly impossible, before being spat out and effectively disowned. We haven’t worked out what to do with people who used to have their fingers on the UK’s metaphorical nuclear button but are now irrelevant. Options for ex-PMs in recent years include waiting around to get a peerage and maybe being tapped up for a ministerial comeback in times of desperation, plotting to regain the party leadership one day while writing increasingly unhinged op-eds, or going mad.
It makes sense that Sunak is at a loose end. It makes sense that he wants to share his expertise with people who will listen. It’s also apparent that those people are not to be found within the party he used to lead, which is doing its best to forget he ever existed. Perhaps Kemi Badenoch’s loss is Microsoft’s gain. Or perhaps the real scandal isn’t the advice Sunak might give some tech companies or the money they might pay him to do it – it’s that the political ecosystem which created Rishi Sunak no longer has any place for him.
[Further reading: The Tories’ collapse has hurt Labour]
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