Tory MPs are already war-gaming what follows the election. Defeat seems certain, but then what? There will be an almighty tussle in which up to 200 colleagues scramble for a handful of the same sort of jobs: consultancies, directorships and advisory gigs. In these Tory Hunger Games, the clever thing to do is to start taking the best jobs now.

Chris Skidmore, for example, is not hanging about. His 14 years in parliament involved a three-month stint as interim energy minister, after which he wrote a book about net zero. The green job offers came thick and fast. He was made a professor of practice in net zero policy at Bath University and bagged two £80,000-a-year advisory gigs, all while collecting his full-time MP’s salary representing constituents in Kingswood. Only politics can turn someone without any formal qualifications into a professor and consultant.

There will be an almighty tussle in which up to 200 colleagues scramble for a handful of jobs

Skidmore started his lucrative new life while he was still tied to his old one. After Rishi Sunak suggested an autumn election, he stood down from his seat, ostensibly over the decision to drill in the North Sea. Kings-wood faces a pointless £250,000 by-election before the seat is abolished by the constituency boundary changes later this year.

Skidmore is not the only MP who has turned himself into a green king of the private sector. Take Alok Sharma, the former business secretary, who has also vented outrage about the North Sea drilling decision. Sunak, he proclaimed, is guilty of ‘chopping and changing’ climate policies, reinforcing ‘the unfortunate perception about the UK rolling back from climate action’. He didn’t say why he disagreed with the government’s logic that it is cleaner and greener to use what’s left in the North Sea than to import Liquefied Natural Gas from Qatar and America.

Only a cynic who witnessed the tears Sharma shed as COP26 president would doubt the sincerity of his fury. But it’s worth noting that his eco-earnings now dwarf his humble salary as a backbencher. After standing down from the COP presidency 14 months ago, he too announced plans to quit parliament. Like Skidmore, Sharma did not wait until the election to start bagging second jobs. Since September, he has been advising the Swedish bank SEB on ‘geo-political and economic trends, green finance, carbon transition and strategic issues’. The price of his expertise is £1,000 an hour.

On the speaking circuit, he’s billed as an expert on ‘sustainable investing’ and the ‘energy transition’. He has so far earned £95,000 extolling their virtues for the likes of UBS and JP Morgan, travelling to places as far afield as Abu Dhabi and Sydney. Sir Alok’s online profile makes two references to his knighthood, but no mention of the fact that he is still a serving member of parliament for Reading West. 

Since David Cameron was elected on his ‘vote blue, go green’ slogan, a third of all former energy ministers have cashed in on their purported eco-expertise. Perhaps the record for speediness was set by Claire Perry O’Neill, a former aide to George Osborne, who ended up in parliament and the cabinet. After she was ousted as COP president in favour of Sharma in early 2020, it took her just six days to file documents to set up her eponymous consultancy firm. Last year, the company boasted net assets of £244,000.

Chris Huhne, the former Lib Dem MP for Eastleigh and secretary of state for energy and climate change at the start of the co-alition government, has reinvented himself as a major player in the UK biogas energy sector. Prior to returning to parliament in 2017, Ed Davey, Huhne’s successor and the current Lib Dem leader, advised MHP Communications when it boasted EDF Energy on its books. Greg Barker, a junior minister under Huhne and Davey, went to work for the oligarch Oleg Deripaska at his firm EN+ as it prepared for the green transition; Nick Hurd, one-time climate change minister in Theresa May’s government, now advises investment firms Pollination and i(x) Net Zero. The millionaire Zac Goldsmith is fortunate enough not to need such means of employment.

Contingency planning was certainly on the minds of some MPs when it came to last year’s reshuffles. Cabinet Office rules dictate that former ministers need official clearance before they can accept any new jobs within two years of leaving government. Tories who are stepping down at the next election or who expect to lose their seats were therefore less inclined to take new roles in government for fear that doing so would frustrate their post-parliamentary employment prospects. Ben Wallace, for instance, had every incentive to quit as defence secretary when he did.

Skidmore was key to the corporate greenery ‘big bang’: he was the energy minister who signed into law in June 2019 Theresa May’s decision to oblige her successors to hit net zero by 2050 with little consideration of the costs. The legislation, passed in the dying days of her government, ‘changed the whole equation’ in the words of one lobbyist. It led to an explosion of consultancies touting green strategies and technologies in the knowledge that the government would channel millions to companies that could claim they’d help the country reach its target.

The organisation that polices the net-zero commitment is the powerful Climate Change Committee. Until recently, this was headed by the octogenarian John Gummer, John Major’s environment minister. Who will replace him? Now that Skidmore is out of the running – ‘I suspect it wasn’t highly paid enough,’ quips one minister – his old boss, David (now Baron) Willetts, has sent in his CV.

Will Keir Starmer keep the green gravy train going? He originally planned to spend £28 billion a year on such projects but it seems he has since decided that the sum is unaffordable. Now and again, he makes noises about tightening the rules for MPs who move from Westminster into consultancies. As well he might: nothing is likely to frighten retiring Tories more.