A bit of pocket money for Rishi Sunak

With his wife Akshata Murty set to pocket £7.7 million in dividend pay from family firm Infosys next month, former prime minister Rishi Sunak would be forgiven were he never to work again and spend his days with his feet up watching cricket.

But Sunak, who remains MP for Richmond and Northallerton when not working as a visiting fellow at California’s Stanford University, has just topped up the family coffers with his first reported bumper speaking engagement payment.

The former Tory leader has just registered with the House of Commons authorities a whopping £160,750 – not too far off what he earned annually for being PM – for a single three-hour speech to private equity firm Bain Capital, the former employer of Mitt Romney which caused him such trouble during his failed 2012 bid for the US presidency.

Sunak’s speech was booked via the Washington Speakers Bureau, the agency which also acts for fellow former Tory PMs Theresa May, David Cameron and John Major along with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the latter’s wife Sarah. At approximately £53,583 an hour, it’s nice work if you can get it!

The Sunaks had made much of the setting up of The Richmond Project, a new charity focused on improving numeracy, in March, although it has yet to formally launch. The Office of Akshata Murty and Rishi Sunak was also registered as an unlimited business venture at Companies House last November, its ‘unlimited’ structure removing the need to make its accounts public.

Murty, meanwhile, is set to see her dividend income from tech firm Infosys for the 2024-25 financial year rise to a cool £15.1 million if approved by the firm’s AGM next month. Her stake in the family firm is reported as comprising 1.1% of the business as at the end of March this year, with her 40,783,162 shares worth around £566 million.

The pair will no doubt keep a keen eye on the Sunday Times Rich List, which last year calculated their joint worth at £651 million, when it is published this weekend. Could this be the year Sunak can finally run to an umbrella?