At the very highest level, it consumes every waking hour, sometimes to the point of wrecking marriages, lives and health. Even on the lowest rung of the ladder, being a good backbench MP is not the sort of job from which you clock off at 5pm sharp, let alone bunk off for an afternoon. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. The only surprising thing about this week’s renewed demands for a ban on MPs taking second jobs as political consultants is that it took public outrage over Owen Paterson’s paid lobbying for the penny to drop. The Scottish and Welsh parliaments already forbid this particular kind of moonlighting, so why not Westminster? Ban dubious corporate gigs for politicians tomorrow, and before long it will seem bizarre that an arrangement so obviously open to abuse – under which MPs can work as consultants so long as they don’t actually lobby on behalf of their clients – was ever allowed. If a company really values an MP for their personal knowledge and skills, rather than for their ability to have a word in the right ear, then it can hire them a decent interval after they’ve left. A side hustle is not, of course, always a terrible thing for a politician. Sometimes it can be socially useful, as in the case of those MPs who are qualified doctors and nurses keeping up their registration by doing the odd hospital shift, or reservists in the armed forces. Several medically trained MPs returned to the Covid wards or put in stints at vaccination clinics during the pandemic, and in doing so didn’t just benefit their patients. The Commons too was better informed for members standing up and explaining exactly what they’d seen in A&E or (in the case of Labour’s Nadia Whittome) in care homes. Work shadowing schemes for MPs, letting them step into the shoes of their constituents for a couple of weeks a year, could hugely enrich parliament’s understanding of the outside world too. But it insults voters’ intelligence to pretend that taking five-figure sums to advise big companies – or even to knock out a few Daily Telegraph columns – is genuinely for the good of the nation. Second jobs with no social value should be banned. By all means, let there be a quid pro quo for this sacrifice. An MP’s salary of nearly £82,000 is generous at three times the average British pay packet, but going into politics still involves a hefty pay cut for some, and comes with public pressure to forego any annual rise you might be offered. It’s less than an NHS surgeon or a high-flying head at a multi-academy trust might earn, and while those jobs are infinitely demanding, they don’t routinely come with daily hate mail, panic buttons in your bedroom and police advice to vary the time and route when walking your children to school. So let’s have a review of both salaries and the part of the expenses bill that covers staff costs – given researchers and caseworkers also shoulder life-or-death responsibilities for constituents and risks to their own safety for an awful lot less money – alongside a ban on consultant jobs. Improve security, clamp down on social media abuse of public figures, give female MPs the right to proper paid maternity leave instead of forcing them to haul their newborns along to constituency engagements, and take allegations of harassment and bullying at Westminster seriously rather than allowing investigations to drift on inconclusively for so long that the victim just gives up hope. Offer defeated MPs more help and support in finding new jobs too, given politics is one of the few professions where you can be fired for no fault of your own, should the electorate happen to turn against the national leader of your party. We might even consider how much of MPs’ surgery time is spent picking up things that should really be the responsibility of other public services (not least mental health) which are hopelessly overstretched. There are more than enough ways, in short, to make a life in politics more attractive and more rewarding. But the prospect of picking up a lucrative gig from the backbenches, especially once you’ve retired from a ministerial job providing useful connections, should not be one of them.