The United Kingdom’s disgraced former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss pocketed a whopping sum of over £18,000 after leaving Downing Street, explosive documents have revealed. According to The Mirror, both leaders were handed the amount as severance pay.
Records show that £455,392 was paid to erstwhile ministers in total, some of whom ended up walking right back into the government, months later. Truss, who plummeted the economy with her botched mini-budget plan, was given £18,660 from taxpayers’ money, despite holding office for less than 50 days.
Her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng ended up receiving more than £16,000. Johnson was given the same amount as his successor Truss. Tom Scholar, who served as the Treasury’s top civil servant but was later sacked by Truss, cost Britons about £335,000. Furthermore, he was also given £122,000 in other payments such as annual leave adjustments.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman Grant Shapps was also given the pay, but he offered some of it to charity following his return as Home Secretary. A spokesperson for Shapps revealed that he had kept in an amount equivalent to six weeks. The remaining, which was about £6,437, was given to the Charities Aid Foundation.
What about Rishi Sunak’
The payments did not leave out Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister of the United Kingdom. After Sunak stepped down from the Johnson government last summer, he was handed £16,876. However, he repaid the amount after he took office later in the year.
The revelations have caused outrage, with one Labour politician asserting that Tories should be “hanging their heads in embarrassment, not walking away with an enormous payoff.” “At a time when people up and down the country are struggling to pay their mortgages and put food on the table, it shows a staggering lack of shame for them to accept this money, but is exactly what we’ve come to expect from a bunch of Tories who only care about themselves,” said Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner.
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