Sir Geoffrey Cox – the Commons’ own Rumpole of the Bailey – might not have married into billions like Rishi Sunak, but he seems intent on earning them.
Updated parliamentary records show that the former attorney general has banked – on top of his basic £84,000 salary as a backbench MP – £270,000 in pay so far this year, with most of it coming from the law firm Withers, which pays him £100,000 a quarter for serving as their global counsel, plus top-up fees. The latest payments take his earnings from the Bar to around £6.3m for the period he has been an MP.
During lockdown in 2021, Cox was found to have been moonlighting for the government of the British Virgin Islands, some 4,000 miles away from his constituents, in a £3.7m Caribbean villa. He has lately insisted that Andrew Fahie, the premier of the BVIs – who was last week arrested in the US as part of a corruption probe – was not and never had been a client of his.
Cox sets his sights on millions
The latest payments take his earnings from the Bar to around £6.3m for the period he has been an MP
