As you may have noted from the extract above – taken from the House of Commons register of members interests – the event took up just four hours of Alistair Darling’s time.
So that fee works out at £3,825 an hour. Nice work if you can get it.
Legal market geeks may recall that a week before Darling made his speech Linklaters admitted that it had made a number of support staff redundant, declining to comment on how many jobs went.
A spokesperson for the firm said at the time: “We can confirm that reluctantly there have been a small number of headcount reductions in business services in the UK.”
Darling’s lucratively rewarded four hours of work equates to £300 more than a junior support staff member in Linklaters’ IT and HR functions gets in a whole year, with such positions remunerated at the ‘London living wage’ of £15,000 per annum.
But then Linklaters and the former chancellor are old pals, their paths having crossed during the implementation of Labour’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and later following the insolvency of Lehman Brothers – gigs from which the magic circle firm creamed plentiful fees.
