Andy McSmith's Diary: Slick work brings in the cash for Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi

Finding the cash to heat the stables need never be a problem for the Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi for as long as his latest gig lasts. He has been signed up as chief strategy officer of Gulf Keystone Petroleum, one of the biggest operators in the oilfields of Kurdistan. His pay, “until further notice”, is £20,125 a month. That is £241,500 a year.

The company expects him to put in between eight and 21 hours a week. In September, he received a single payment of £52,325 to cover the first two-and-a-half months in the job.

Zahawi, who is MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, has other oil interests in the region and is a member of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee; he is also David Cameron’s adviser on apprenticeships, and is a Kurd by descent, whose parents fled Iraq during the Saddam Hussein years. His qualifications will be useful to Gulf Keystone, whose income has been hit by the war between the Kurds and Isis.

Zahawi was never one to struggle by on an MP’s £67,000 annual salary. In the Register of Members’ Interests, he declares nearly £28,000 in other outside earnings in the past 12 months. During the expenses scandal the Sunday Mirror revealed he had claimed for the cost of heating the riding stables attached to his Warwickshire home. He declared that he was “mortified” by this mistake, and paid the money back.

An MP who fosters respect

On a different salary scale, the MP for Sefton Central, Bill Esterson, has declared that he is paid £40 a day by Liverpool council, for which he and his wife work as foster carers. He claims the work occupies 168 hours a week. That works out at £1.67 an hour, less than a quarter of the national minimum wage.

One can’t make allowances

Someone else is dipping into the public purse – but more cautiously than in the past. For many months after Lord Hanningfield returned to Westminster, having served his time in prison for fiddling his expenses, he scarcely missed an opportunity to clock in and claim his £300 tax-free attendance allowance.

Then he was caught by a tabloid photographer leaving the premises barely 20 minutes after he went in. He was banned from Parliament for a year, and had to pay back £3,300. He returned in May, and the latest figures show that in June he pocketed £1,200. In September, the peer was charged with expenses fraud, relating to claims made in 2013.

A prickly debate

For some reason, MPs are on a break for the rest of this week, having sat daily through school half-term. Before they dispersed, they discussed hedgehogs. According to Rory Stewart, an environment minister, it was Parliament’s first debate on this subject since 1566. Oliver Colvile, a Tory MP whose love of hedgehogs dates from when his mother read him Beatrix Potter, is worried by their decline in numbers. He suggested they replace the lion as Britain’s national symbol.

Responding for the Government, Stewart opened with a dash of Latin – “Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum” (The fox has many tricks, the hedgehog only one) – before meandering through the times of Tyrannosaurus rex, Sumeria and ancient Egypt. He quoted Shakespeare. He scorned the Tudor myth that hedgehogs suck milk from cows. He mentioned the redshank, the Arctic tern and the naturalist Hugh Warwick, rounding off with some Thomas Hardy.

As for Colvile’s suggestion, he asked: “Do we want to have as our national symbol an animal which when confronted with danger rolls over into a ball and puts its spikes up [and] that sleeps for six months of the year?” Nothing was decided.