Former Chancellor George Osborne is earning £25,000 an hour for giving speeches to bankers, traders and asset managers

Carsten Koall/Getty Images

LONDON — Former Chancellor George Osborne has developed a lucrative new sideline as an after dinner speaker, making an average of £25,000 ($31,396) per hour for speeches given to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions in the past few months.

According to the latest Register of Members’ Financial Interests — which tracks the fees earned by MPs for work not related to their role as public servants — Osborne has picked up around £720,000 for 12 speeches and appearances since October.

While his public speeches have already been disclosed previously, he latest register includes two new speeches totaling £92,396 delivered in January.

In total, he has worked for 28.5 hours during these appearances.

That means Osborne has earned almost 10 times his annual salary as a backbench MP (£74,962) for the equivalent of less than a week’s work.

Osborne was Chancellor of the Exchequer between 2010 and 2016, returning to the back benches after Theresa May took over as Prime Minister, making Philip Hammond her Chancellor. Osborne joined the Washington Speakers Bureau, an after-dinner speakers agency, shortly afterwards. He remains an MP for his constituency of Tatton in Cheshire.

His speeches have largely been delivered to financiers, with his list of appearances including trips to JPMorgan, HSBC, BlackRock, Citi, St James’s Wealth Management, Aberdeen Asset Management, and a firm called Palmex Derivatives. He has also spoken to an audience at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a public policy think-tank.

You can see the full list of appearances that he has disclosed here.

Alongside his public speaking, Osborne stands to earn a significant sum for a new role he will undertake at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. Osborne will join the Blackrock Investment Institute as a senior adviser on a part-time basis. He has yet to disclose how much the role — which he will do for one day a week — will pay, but according to Sky News, it will “be “at least” hundreds of thousands of pounds annually.”

“George has a unique and invaluable perspective on the issues that are shaping our world today,” BlackRock CEO and Chairman Laurence Fink said in a statement when the appointment was announced late in January.

In joining BlackRock, Osborne will once again be working with his former chief economic adviser Rupert Harrison who is the firm’s chief macroeconomic strategist.