Theresa May is not known in Westminster for her oratory. Though try not to tell that to the people of South Korea.
The former prime minister earned £136,000 last month for delivering a speech in Seoul on global responses to the coronavirus pandemic. It takes her total for after-dinner talks so far this year to more than £1 million.
The fee means that the MP for Maidenhead appears to have surpassed Boris Johnson for after-dinner earning power.
Before becoming prime minister in July last year, Mr Johnson was paid £123,000 to fly to India and address a publishing company in the New Delhi quarter of Connaught Place.
In the year and a half since she left Downing Street, Mrs May has had a lucrative set of speaking engagements in at least three different continents.
Earning an average of £110,000 per talk, she has delivered speeches in Zurich, Atlanta, Dubai and San Antonio. In February she was paid £115,000 to speak at the Global Women’s Forum in the United Arab Emirates. In March she spoke to students at Brown University, Rhode Island, about international relations for the same fee.
On her 30-hour round trip to the South Korean capital, Mrs May met President Moon at his official residence, a 14th century palace set in 62 acres of manicured gardens.
She praised the country’s “pioneering approach to track and trace” and paid her respects to the 1,108 British soldiers who died in the Korean war. It is thought that Mrs May had a coronavirus test before departing the UK and before returning.
Not all of her engagements, however, have taken her far. A “virtual speaking engagement” with a Mexican telecoms company last month netted her £46,750.
In total she has earned close to £1.5 million since leaving office. Along with former prime ministers including Tony Blair, David Cameron and Gordon Brown, she has signed up to an exclusive agency called the Washington Speakers’ Bureau. She received a joining fee of £190,000 in December.
Many of Mrs May’s contemporaries from Westminster also charge tens of thousands of pounds to entertain figures from the world of business.
Last year Lord Hammond of Runnymede, the former chancellor, made £54,000 speaking to P20, a payments company, about cybersecurity in Atlanta. HSBC paid Sajid Javid £30,000 for two speeches in Canary Wharf this summer.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone, the prime minister’s brother, earned £10,000 to talk to a management and investment company in Copenhagen last October. Chuka Umunna, the former Labour MP who left to set up a new party, was paid only £3,000 last July to address a futuristic product-design company in Berlin called Pentatonic. Ken Clarke, Amber Rudd, David Lammy and David Davis are some of the other MPs who have delivered after-dinner speeches in recent years. Jeremy Hunt, who ran against Mr Johnson for the Tory leadership, has held forth to banks across London in the past 12 months, but the former health secretary donated the £53,000 he earned to charity.
Former politicians are not obliged to declare their earnings from after-dinner speeches if they no longer sit in parliament. Thirteen years after he last took to the dispatch box, one figure still sits top of the pile, however. Tony Blair received £237,000 for a 20-minute speech in Dongguan in southern China in 2007, compared with the £120,000 that David Cameron got ten years later to discuss Brexit in New York.
Mrs May’s earnings outside parliament dwarf her MP’s salary of £81,932, though she remains an outspoken figure in the Commons. This week she mouthed her incredulity at a response given by Michael Gove to a question on the UK’s post-Brexit security arrangements. Earlier this month she criticised the government’s planning reforms, saying they would not deliver “a single extra home”. In one speech delivered days after Mrs May, 64, returned from Seoul, the former prime minister said that breaking international law would “weaken the UK in the eyes of the world” during a debate on the Internal Market Bill.
Mrs May was asked last year if she would write an account of her time in No 10 but it emerged that she preferred a “good thriller or detective book” to political memoirs, although she did not rule it out. Mrs May was asked for comment.
Talk’s not so cheap
Tony Blair £237,000 for 20-minute speech in Dongguan to 600 Chinese party officials in 2007.
Theresa May £136,000, speech to the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul on solutions to Covid-19 this year.
Boris Johnson £123,000, Brexit speech to Indian TV channel in Delhi last year.
David Cameron £120,000, talk on Brexit to Blackstone in New York in 2016.
George Osborne £81,000, 2016 talk to JP Morgan in New York.
Gordon Brown £75,000, 2011 charities conference, Lagos.
