Would you have Pat (Cash for questions) as a Director of your company Australian-born Patricia Hewitt, once a firebrand Left-wing supporter of Tony Benn for the party’s deputy leadership, but an ardent Blairite once he came to power and put her in the Cabinet, boasted to the undercover TV team that she had a five-point plan to help companies lobby ministers and civil servants. Married to a judge, the former Health Secretary stepped into a handful of lucrative jobs with health firms after leaving the Government in 2007. Last year, her final year in the Commons, she earned an estimated £267,000 on top of her MP’s salary and expenses through well-paid commercial posts and directorships. As ‘special consultant’ to Boots the chemist (a post she recently gave up), she was paid £4,600 a month to ‘provide advice and attend meetings’. She was also paid £5,000 a month as ‘special adviser’ to investment firm Cinven, which specialises in buy-outs in the healthcare industry (it paid Bupa £1.44billion for its 25 hospitals). Hewitt has recently also given up this post. But she remains an independent director of BT, with her earnings last year of £128,000 having just been raised to £152,000, and she is also an adviser of Eurotunnel, which paid her £23,500 last year for attending ten meetings. Mrs Hewitt, who has also stood down as an MP, said she completely rejected the suggestion she helped obtain a key seat on a government advisory group for a client paying her £3,000 a day. The former health secretary said the role she had been discussing would only have been taken up after she stepped down as an MP at the next election. There was nothing unusual or improper in the business appointments that I have taken up since leaving government, she added Read more: dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002302/How-onetime-Labour-bigwigs-raking-private-sector.html#ixzz3Amjmebkc Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 22:46:22 +0000