Official records reveal that leadership contender David Miliband has accrued over half a million pounds in private earnings and expenses over a single year.
Over the financial year 2011-12, the former foreign secretary earned £446,320.60 in fees alone – for advice, directorships, speeches and lectures. For venture capital firm VantagePoint, he received £92,839.75 – for four-and-a-half days work. For a half day at Indus Basin Holdings, a private Hydroelectric venture on the Indian sub-continent, he took £7,560.85.
Among his expenses, two trips to Jordan, sponsored by the government of that country, came in at £4,161.
£4,995 was from Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative, through which the former PM is advising the President of Guinea on the latter’s relationships with mining companies.
For consultancy Oxford Analytica, Mr Miliband received fees and expenses worth a total of £55,758.33. He declared that he had worked eight days for the firm over the year.
He also spent a week lecturing at Stanford University, charging a fee of £25,027 and travel and accommodation worth £3,834. Incidentally, this is where his former American counterpart Condoleezza Rice (pictured above with Miliband) has set up shop since her own retirement from politics.
No sooner had Miliband lost the Labour leadership race to brother Ed in 2010 that commentators were discussing if he would ever return to the front line. But with outside earnings in a league one would struggle to fit any other serving Labour MP into, it seems he has decided firmly on the retirement circuit.
Blair and Milbands both of them, thank god I have left.
Don’t know, ask Michael Meacher who blogs here, if his private income is a hint at retirement.