Retromania is well and truly upon us. Neil Young just headlined Glastonbury. Noel Edmonds is back on the telly. And a Tory MP has been turned over by a Sunday newspaper in a cash-for-questions scandal. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1997. 

The humiliated party this time around is George Freeman, a former science minister in Rishi Sunak’s government. He left frontline politics before frontline politics had the chance to leave him – and he was last heard from moaning in 2024 that he was unable to afford a £2,000-a-month mortgage on his £118,000 ministerial salary.  

After that, he found a side-hustle that better answered his needs – advising an environmental monitoring company called GHGSat, which paid him £5,000 a month for just eight hours of work between last April and March this year. When he took the job, he quite properly consulted Acoba, the regulator that presides over the ethics of private-sector appointments for former ministers and civil servants.

GHGSat have said that they ‘retained George Freeman MP for a brief period’ and that their agreement with him ‘did not include any lobbying activities’.

Since Freeman remains a trade envoy and a member of the Science and Technology Committee, Acoba quite properly went out of its way to warn him that given ‘this is a company that is interested in government policy and decisions relating to the civil space sector and emissions… there are risks associated with your influence and network of contacts gained whilst in ministerial office’. Acoba says Freeman specifically assured it that he had ‘made it clear to the company that [he would] not lobby government on its behalf’. 

Anyway, now he’s in the soup because the Sunday Times has established that while he was in this company’s employment he appears to have tabled several written........

© The Spectator