At-risk Tories are looking to board the green gravy train

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.

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.