What do you get when you pay $400,000 to Barack Obama for a speech? Or if you recruit George Osborne, former UK chancellor, to a four-days-a-month advisory role at a salary of £650,000 a year? In a former job at an investment bank, I occasionally produced write-ups of meetings at which “global advisers” and “senior fellows” mingled with the corporate finance crowd, and often speculated on why we were spending so much money on the retired political upperworld when it could otherwise have gone into the bonus pool.
Pure and simple influence-buying is a lot rarer than people on the outside might think. These days, anyone in a position to do regulatory favours for a big bank is going to have conflict-of-interest policies all over the place. In any case, lobbying is the job of lobbyists, best done in dark corners and private offices, not by paying for a public speech in an auditorium.
After observing these gatherings at length, in the days when I used to get half of my calorie intake from conference room sandwiches, I concluded this could not be the explanation — the expenditure is just not in proportion to any realistic guess at the influence bought, especially when you compare it with the salary of a proper 24/7 lobbyist. Instead, the old joke is true. Politics really is showbusiness for ugly people.