*Jack of five trades, master of none?

From that excellent blog: http://www.boriswatch.co.uk/2008/05/15/


1. Mayor. This full-time, high-profile, extremely powerful position brings in £137,000 a year, which most of us would be pretty happy with.

2. Chair of Transport for London. No extra money for this, and it’s sensible since he’s legally responsible for TfL’s fares. No complaints here.

3. Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, from September. The last holder of this post, Len Duvall, devoted three days a week to the job, so demanding and important a role was it. Since Boris is so keen to cut back on all crime (except his own), one can only assume he will be keen to devote at least as much time to it as Len. He obviously won’t want to give them a target and leave them to get on with it, since he refused to give any hint of a target for cutting crime during his election campaign.

4. *MP for Henley. Now the extra money starts rolling in. At a bare minimum, he must be pocketing the standard MP’s salary of £61,820. On top of this, in 06/07 he claimed £134,306 in expenses, according to a PDF on the UK Parliament web site. (Yes, I realise more than half of this is staffing costs, but staff costs don’t appear to be escaping his scrutiny at the GLA.) And of course, this is another full-time job, between attending Parliament and communicating with constituents, which he intends to fit around his duties in his other four jobs in some mysterious way.

5. Telegraph columnist. Certainly not a full-time job, but a job nonetheless, and one which used to bring in around £250,000 per year. His new salary has not been disclosed as yet, but he’s already trying to limit the damage by offering to scatter a few notes in the direction of the paupers, according to Paul Waugh’s blog - £25,000 for journalism bursaries and £25,000 for the teaching of Classics (perhaps to ensure that the capital’s schoolchildren can understand his references in Mayoral pronouncements to Hyrcanian tigers and the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot).

By my reckoning, he’ll have an income, including his MP’s expenses and the donations under no. 5 above (which are hardly set in stone), of nearly £600,000, and somehow expects to be able to fit in the work of almost three full-time jobs in total.

Either he’s developed giraffe-level stamina, or he intends to neglect some or all of the jobs he’s being handsomely rewarded for supposedly doing.

*Update: Boris has sent in a ‘resignation’ letter, but omitted to mention when he was actually leaving the job.