It’s the first Sunday broadcast round of 2023. Ahead of Rishi Sunak’s big grilling on the BBC, Sir Keir Starmer was up on Sky News, keen to depict Labour as the party of change. So it was jolly bad timing then that Sky chose this week to unveil their ‘Westminster Accounts’ project with Tortoise Media: a huge dossier on politicans’ outside earnings based in part on their declarations in the register of MPs’ interests.
And while most of the top ten MPs with outside earnings are Conservative, one Labour member has been coining it in since the 2019 election. David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary and a key player in Starmer’s top team, has taken home more than £200,000 in outside earnings – as Steerpike has previously noted. Lammy’s thousands primarily come from his broadcasting efforts on LBC and speeches to a variety of good socialist comrades like Blackstone, Google, Deloitte and Facebook.
Sky’s Sophy Ridge duly asked Sir Keir whether Lammy’s existing commitments can be squared with Labour’s pledge to ban second jobs. Starmer squirmed somewhat before suggesting such matters needed further debate to allow exemptions for things like books and broadcasting. Hmm.
Worth remembering of course that Starmer nearly took a rather lucrative second job himself…
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