George Osborne set to join lucrative after dinner speaker circuit following his sacking as Chancellor

George Osborne is the fast lane to make hundreds of thousands of pounds in a new career as an after dinner speaker – proving the point that top rank politicians can make far more money in semi-retirement than while they are in office.

The former Chancellor, who was sacked by Theresa May, has been signed up by the Washington Speakers Bureau, whose books include some of the most famous names in contemporary politics, who can fetch five or six figure sums for delivering a speech.

The agency does not reveal what its clients are paid, but as a sitting MP Mr Osborne will be obliged to declare his outside earnings in the Commons Register of Members’ Interest. Gordon Brown, who was signed up by the same agency after he lost the 2010 general election was paid £46,155.72, plus £24,555.14 in travel and accommodation costs, for delivering a speech in Washington in 2014. While he was backbench MP, Mr Brown gave all his outside earnings to a charitable trust he ran with his wife, Sarah Brown.

Tony Blair is also on the same agency’s books. He has not needed to declare his earnings because he quit Parliament almost immediately after he had left Downing Street, but it has been reported that he was once paid almost £400,000 for delivering two half hour speeches in the Philippines.

When the agency took on the former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott last October, they announced that he would be available to speak if the fee was “over $40,000” (£31,000)

Other speakers on the same agency’s books include another former UK prime minister, Sir John Major, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, a former US President, George W. Bush, and his wife Laura and brother Jeb, three former US secretaries of State, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, another former Australian prime minister, John Howard, a former Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, the former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, the former President of the European Commission, Jose Manuela Barroso, the former Mayor of New York, Rudy Guiliani, the founder of Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, and the former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

Before Mr Osborne could join the cast list, he had to get clearance from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which checks that there is no conflict of interest when former government ministers take up new paid employment.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the former Chancellor will have to wait until three months after being sacked before he starts his new role, in which he is expected to work one or two days a week, giving speeches “on the current political environment“.

He has promised to “personally approve any engagement to ensure that there is no conflict of interest”.

The committee instructed him that he “should not become personally involved in lobbying the UK Government on behalf of the Washington Speakers Bureau or its clients” for at least two years.

Mr Osborne’s salary dropped from £134,500 a year to £74,962 on the day Theresa May sacked him, though under an arrangement introduced by a previous Conservative government, in 1992, he is entitled to a payment of nearly £15,000 to tide him over. He also has a 15 per cent share – worth between £2.25 million and £4.5 million - in Osborne and Little, the wallpaper firm founded by his father, Sir Peter Osborne. Last year, the company sold its London headquarters for £6 million to a company based the British Virgin islands, an off shore tax haven.