Tuesday, August 2, 2016

One who tames

Damian Collins is the acting chairman of the DCMS Select Committee who is so keen to publish salary details of BBC staff and talent earning more than the Prime Minister.

Damian (Belmont Abbey and St Benet's Hall, Oxford) earns £375 an hour from The Author's Licensing and Collecting Society; and extracted a £6,000 advance from Harper Collins for a just-published book on Philip Sassoon. His register notes the hours of writing required "would be impossible to calculate". (Much like well-paid BBC writers, eh ?). He has a flat in London valued at more than £100,000, generating rent of more than £10,000 p.a., yet still claims rental on a London flat.

His wife, former education hackette Sarah Richardson, was a Westminster Conservative Councillor for 12 years, culminating in a year as Lord Mayor. She worked in parallel for Edelman PR for five of those years, and had a secondment to spin for Starbucks "during its high profile corporation tax controversy". Then there was a year working for Centrica "leading on public affairs and thought leadership for Centrica’s international upstream business".

Since January this year, she's been Communications Director for the not-entirely-successful Conservative IN group, salary undisclosed.

Local political opponents of Mr Collins in his Folkestone and Hythe constituency describe him as an "absentee MP" - "He pretends to live in Elham. You live where your children go to school and that is not Elham."

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