ou have to hand it to Sajid Javid. Six months ago, the MP for Bromsgrove was on his uppers, having stormed out of Number 11 Downing St after refusing Dominic Cummings’s diktat to sack his advisers. Now, in the teeth of a global recession, Javid has scored a shiny new job – as an adviser for JP Morgan. How much the former chancellor is being paid by the US bank is unclear. The salary is widely reported as “undisclosed”. But we can be sure it’s more than pocket money. Not bad if you already have a job as a public representative that comes with basic pay north of £80,000. Javid, of course, is not alone in cashing in from his time in Westminster while sitting on the green benches. Theresa May – still the MP for Maidenhead – has earned more than £1m on the international lecture circuit since resigning as prime minister a year ago. The former Tory leader – not exactly renowned as a great public speaker – was even paid £56,000 for an online talk delivered during lockdown. When I finished writing my new book, Democracy for Sale, earlier this year I wondered – at least for a moment – whether I was being too harsh on British politicians. Maybe I was overstating the power of money and influence in our politics. Maybe the system wasn’t as corrupt as I thought. Recent events, however, suggest that if anything my diagnosis about the rotten state of British politics was too kind. From Robert Jenrick’s “apparent bias” over Tory donor Richard Desmond’s lucrative planning application to Boris Johnson’s decision to ennoble his own brother and a cast of cronies, and the doling out of public contracts to political allies, there is less a whiff of corruption about this government and more a stench so powerful it can no longer be ignored. Meanwhile, the revolving door in British politics spins so fast it’s often hard to keep track of who is coming and who is going. In 2018 alone, more than 200 former ministers and senior civil servants took up roles advising and lobbying for different businesses. Within six months of resigning as Brexit secretary, David Davis was earning £3,000 an hour as an “external adviser” to JCB – itself a major donor to the Conservative party. Prior to the 2019 general election, former environment secretary Owen Paterson contacted ministers and officials on behalf of companies that he was paid £112,000 to advise. (Paterson said his financial interests “have been correctly declared according to the rules of the House of Commons”.) The personal connections between politicians and corporate interests have seldom been stronger. A fifth of new Conservative MPs elected in 2019 previously worked as lobbyists. At the other end of their careers, countless senior politicians have walked straight into top corporate jobs, from Nick Clegg as VP at Facebook to George Osborne’s lucrative role at BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm. (Osborne, of course, moved in a short space of time from being the chancellor to editing the Evening Standard, which is owned by Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian press baron elevated to the Lords by the prime minister last month. Osborne’s successor at the Standard, meanwhile, is Emily Sheffield, whose brother-in-law is David Cameron. It’s a small world.) Parliament’s anti-corruption watchdog, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), is a feeble instrument that seldom, if ever, stands in the way of politicians taking plum jobs outside government. In the case of Javid, Acoba warned that the former chancellor’s “privileged access to information” meant accepting a job with JP Morgan carried “potential risks” – but still gave the green light anyway. The prime minister himself has shown scant regard for the threadbare rules that are supposed to protect the integrity of our politics. In 2018, Acoba criticised Johnson for not asking its advice before renewing his contract as a columnist at the Telegraph just three days after resigning as foreign minister. Johnson was allowed to keep the job, with its £275,000 annual salary. Such eye-watering sums only serve to feed voters’ growing mistrust of politics. Will our politicians be willing to anger big banks and Silicon Valley if the same firms are likely to feather their nests almost as soon as they sit up from the cabinet table? The implicit message from such large firms may be that if you keep out of our way, there’ll be a nicely paid gig waiting for you when leaving high office. Perceptions matter. A study by Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy published earlier this year found that globally some 58% of people were unhappy with democracy. Discontent was particularly pronounced in the UK. The good news is that the system could be cleaned up. A ban on MPs taking second jobs would be a reasonable place to start – as Labour MP Zarah Sultana recently outlined on these pages. The bad news is that major reform requires political will. Right now, that seems about as likely as a week passing without another revelation of government sleaze. • Peter Geoghegan is investigations editor at openDemocracy and the author of Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics