By this point the pattern is visible. The remaining question is why it is allowed to continue. The answer is not that everyone inside the system is secretly coordinating. It is simpler than that. The people best placed to close these gaps are the same people least exposed to the damage they cause, and often the same people whose careers are made easier by leaving them open. The people at the top of government did not run this system. But they certainly profited from it. Chris Grayling was Transport Secretary from 2016 to 2019, the years when HS2’s costs were escalating and the warnings that would later be hidden from Parliament were reaching the department. In September 2020, a year after leaving office, Grayling took a £100,000 advisory role with Hutchison Ports, operator of Felixstowe and Harwich. The role required seven hours of work per week. ACOBA approved it. David Cameron joined Greensill Capital as an adviser on a reported $1 million a year. During the pandemic he sent more than 45 messages to serving ministers, including to private phones, lobbying for government-backed COVID loans for Greensill. Greensill subsequently collapsed. ACOBA reviewed the arrangement. Nothing enforceable followed. What Cameron was selling was not expertise. It was the private phone numbers of the sitting cabinet. Tony Blair left Downing Street in 2007. His net worth is now somewhere in the region of £100 million. The disclosed components include advisory roles at JP Morgan and Zurich Financial Services, taken on almost immediately after leaving office. Reports suggest approximately $11 million a year from the government of Kazakhstan. For a period, by industry estimates, he was the highest-paid public speaker in the world. Boris Johnson earned £5 million in his first six months out of office. Two speeches alone accounted for more than £520,000, for roughly seven hours of work. Theresa May was paid £115,000 for a single speech at Brown University. That figure happens, by coincidence, to equal the £115,000-a-year allowance every former Prime Minister receives from public funds.
Different ministers, different parties, different ideologies. The same post-office economics. There is no proven quid pro quo, no evidence that any of them sold a specific decision while in office. But that is precisely what makes the system so effective. When the post-office payday is this reliable, no cash needs to change hands while the person is still in office. The incentive sits in the job itself. From the same industries, the same governments, the same networks they were supposed to regulate while they held the keys. What is being sold is the address book, and the access that comes with having been, at one point, close to the decisions that matter. Mark Thurston now runs Anglian Water. Beth West now runs East West Railway Company. Sean Clark received a reprimand. The Croydon directors were re-employed by other councils. Baroness Mone remains in the House of Lords. Not one of these people was imprisoned. Not one was barred from public life. That is what corruption looks like in Britain. Not brown envelopes. Not suitcases of cash. Consulting fees. Advisory retainers. Speaking engagements. Board seats. Contracts awarded to companies that did not exist a month earlier. A legal system that struggles to distinguish reckless waste from bad luck, and a political system that has learned to call the whole arrangement normal. A railway that costs eight times what it costs anywhere else. A law against wasting public money shelved for thirty years by the people it would have applied to. More than six million people waiting for hospital treatment in a country that spent £100 billion on a train to Birmingham.
How much more has to go missing, how many more services have to fail, before enough people notice that the money is not being wasted……………It is being taken?
© DJM 2026
