Perks of the Job
TetleysTLDR: The Summary
MPs are taking lavish, all-expenses-paid trips from lobby groups, foreign governments & shady donors, including regimes with appalling human rights records, thanks to a legal loophole that bans foreign party donations but not foreign-funded junkets. These freebies buy influence, shape speeches & warp UK foreign policy, turning MPs into paid mouthpieces for the highest bidder. Another loophole of course is the Israel Lobby: funnelling cash into Westminster for influence.
TetleysTLDR: The article
Well it’s August. Me and the missus are scraping few quid together to have a few days up in Scotland. The rest of us will be cracking the piggy banks for a week in a caravan, frying in a budget airline queue, or just staying home because the rent’s gone up again. But for Westminster’s finest? Happy days. Holiday season means jetting off first class to exotic locales: no expense spared, and not paying a single bloody penny themselves.
Their luxury getaways aren’t funded by hard graft or a bit of overtime. They’re courtesy of foreign governments, shadowy lobby groups, and donor networks with human rights records that make your stomach turn.
And here’s the scandal: foreign donations to UK parties are banned. But foreign regimes can legally wine, dine, and fly our MPs around the world in business class. A loophole so wide you could taxi a private jet through it. And they do.
QATAR: HUMAN RIGHTS? WHO CARES, PASS THE CHAMPAGNE
Since last summer, the oil-soaked dictatorship of Qatar has spent over £63,000 bringing British MPs over for conferences and ‘fact-finding’ missions. This is a state where LGBTQ+ people are criminalised, migrant workers are worked to death, and free speech exists only as a bad joke. The ‘fact finding’ is which bottle of contraband Bubbly goes best with the caviar.
Florence Eshalomi, former Labour shadow minister for democracy was one of nine MPs on Qatar’s all-expenses-paid list. It’s not the first time: ahead of the 2022 World Cup, Qatar showered MPs with hospitality. Surprise, surprise: some of those same MPs then made warm, fuzzy speeches about the Gulf monarchy in Parliament. Qatar bunged a quarter of a million into our MPs paws prior to the tournament.
This isn’t diplomacy. It’s the political equivalent of slipping a bouncer a brown envelope to get into the VIP section. The World Cup MP Gravy Train
BAHRAIN: A DICTATORSHIP IN FALCON GOLD
Bahrain is another one that knows how to work a Westminster crowd. The monarchy’s foreign ministry flew Priti Patel to the capital Manama last December at a cost of more than £25,000. That’s before chucking in a ‘Falcon Gold’ business-class upgrade worth another £2,400.
Patel wasn’t slumming it alone. Tory fixer Sir Andrew Mitchell, Lib Dem Layla Moran, and Labour’s Fabian Hamilton were all there, smiling for the cameras while Bahrain locks up journalists and tortures political prisoners.
Transparency International summed it up: “Overseas political donations are banned, yet foreign governments can still buy access to MPs through all-expenses-paid trips.” It’s corruption by another name. You've heard of Sleepless in Seatle? Well this is MPs in Manama
ISRAEL: LABOUR AND CONSERVATIVE FRIENDS OF WAR CRIMINALS
And then we come to the Israelis…
While Gaza is starved, bombed, and bulldozed and the ICC issues an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, British MPs are still happy to take freebie jollies to Israel.
Since July 2024, Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) have spent more than £44,000 on these jaunts. They claim the cash comes from ‘private donors’ but they won’t say who. That kind of secrecy reeks.
In May 2025, five Labour MPs flew out with LFI to meet Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel, who, that very month, called reports of mass starvation in Gaza ‘complete lies’ One of them, Cat Eccles, is now under investigation for failing to declare the trip on time.
LFI also paid for Damien Egan, Luke Akehurst, Sharon Hodgson, and chair Jon Pearce to attend the AIPAC Congressional Summit in Washington this February a jamboree for pro-Israel lobbying in the US. Akehurst, the self-titled Zionist Shitlord off on his jollies to see his fellow wankspanners at the AIPAC conference
CFI’s record is even longer: more than 150 free foreign trips since 2012, worth hundreds of thousands. They’re not ‘friends of Israel’ They’re the frequent flyer arm of an occupation regime. Air miles courtesy of El Al.
If you thought it was just the Gulf states and Israel, think again. The British right has been making itself very comfortable in the company of Donald Trump’s political machine.
Frog-faced Fuhrer Nigel Farage, the pint-waving man of the people has taken over £80,000 in luxury US trips from billionaires and political fixers. Christopher Harborne, the money man behind Reform UK, paid £33,000 for Farage to rush to Trump’s side after the attempted assassination last year and another £27,000 for Trump’s second ‘inauguration’.
And if that’s not grubby enough, convicted fraudster George Cottrell, a Farage chum, paid £15,000 for a private jet to Florida, where Nige met up with Elon Musk. Nothing says ‘man of the people’ like clinking glasses with the richest man alive at 30,000 feet.
Suella Braverman cashed in too: £9,000 from the far-right Heritage Foundation: the brains behind the authoritarian ‘Project 2025’, to give a speech in Washington. Oliver Dowden also pocketed £12,000 in hospitality from a Tory donor who just happens to own a US football club. Labour friends of jollies to the Holy Land
THE REAL COST: BOUGHT AND PAID FOR
The defenders of this racket say it’s all ‘relationship building’ and ‘fact finding’. Pull the other one. We’ve seen the receipts. MPs come back from these trips parroting their hosts’ talking points.
Bob Blackman MP openly admitted he’d been ‘fed’ regime propaganda by the Azerbaijani embassy after multiple freebies. Others have been caught lobbying for their benefactors as soon as they touch down at Heathrow. These aren’t harmless jollies. They’re political investments, down payments on future loyalty. Every plane ticket, every luxury hotel, every box of expensive cigars comes with an unspoken IOU.
THE LOOPHOLE PARLIAMENT LOVES
Let’s spell it out. Ordinary voters can’t hand over a foreign donation to a political party, it’s against the law. But a foreign dictator can drop twenty grand on flying an MP to their palace, feed them, wine them, give them a guided tour, and it’s perfectly legal.
They call it a ‘loophole’. Let’ call it what it is – a bung.
And of course Parliament likes it that way. MPs are hooked on the freebies. The same people who lecture us on ‘integrity’ are quite happy to rack up air miles on the tab of a regime that flogs dissidents in public squares.
Dumb and Dumber: nothing shouts man of the people like two millionaires in a Gold lift
NO QUESTIONS, NO CONSEQUENCES
At least for now, nothing’s going to change. MPs will keep stepping off those long-haul flights, tanned and grinning, clutching the propaganda packs they were handed. And the British public will keep footing the real bill in the form of warped foreign policy, compromised lawmakers, and a Parliament that answers not to voters, but to whoever paid for their last ‘fact-finding’ jaunt. And of course you only have to look at the campaign against those protesting against genocide to see exactly what this investment gets you. A Government that doesn’t answer to the people who put it there, but rather its foreign benefactors.
Until this is shut down, Westminster will stay what it is: a luxury travel agency for hire to the highest-bidding tyrant. And the MPs boarding those flights? They’re not public servants. They’re lobbyists in suits, flogging Britain’s integrity one business-class seat at a time.
This article is based on research by Jenna Corderoy and Peter Geoghegan for Democracy for Sale whose work continues to expose the grubby reality of Britain’s pay-to-play politics.
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