28 August 2024

From MP to pigs’ pee: how ejected Tories are faring on the jobs market

Your weekly dose of gossip from Westminster.

The vanquished former MP Lee Rowley has moved to a new but very similar career. Photo by Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire

Vanquished Tories are still scrambling for fresh employment. Former MPs usually seek nice little earners in the City, public affairs and journalism. Not Lee Rowley, a one-time housing minister evicted from North East Derbyshire: he’s creating zero stink embarking on a new career blending animal faeces. According to the approval letter from the Whitehall employment committee Acoba, which cleared Rowley to be project manager of the start-up Recotech, his duties include “treating and modifying poultry litter, digestate, dairy slurry, pig slurry” to produce fertiliser. Rowley is going from the Westminster cesspit into the real thing.

FC Clacton will be playing down the right wing this season after the Essex Senior League football club unveiled a rugger and cricket lovin’ local, self-appointed Reform leader Nigel Farage, as its new patron. The Clacton cuckoo, Westminster’s highest-earning MP, downed a few pints at a beer festival and enjoyed a marquee lunch at the seaside town’s airshow before his latest US money-spinners – his second then third US visits since the election. “I can’t see him on the touchline cheering on the team in February’s wind and rain,” grumbled a supporter, “unless we lay on a big lunch or dangle a fat fee.”

Clubbable Farage isn’t finding parliament the right-wing chumocracy he dreamed of, by the way. Seething old Tory Brexit allies blame him for scores of Conservative soulmates losing their seats. When warmly congratulating David Davis on holding Goole and Pocklington, I’m told Farage grimaced as the Tory broken-nosed SAS reservist gave him both barrels. “No thanks to you,” snapped Davis before adding a curse familiar to Jeremy Hunt.

SNP rocker Pete Wishart, publishing his diaries from the failed 2014 indy referendum, is irked that the Lib Dem Alistair Carmichael claims the unofficial title of Scottish chieftain of the House alongside the recognised Father (Edward Leigh) and Mother (Diane Abbott). Both men were first elected in 2001, and so are Scotland’s longest-serving MPs. While Wishart’s result was announced first, crafty Carmichael beat him in the queue to take the oath, and so booked his place at the top of the pecking order.

Is the veteran left-winger Abbott mellowing? I was informed over the summer that she urged the “Samurai seven” – Labour’s suspended MPs who include John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana – not to vote for the SNP’s King’s Speech amendment to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Starmer has split the Socialist Campaign Group and the workers, disunited, will always be defeated.