Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has confirmed that he maintained full-time positions at two separate financial firms throughout his entire tenure at Number 10, a revelation that has prompted several former colleagues to remark that this explains quite a lot, actually.
The disclosure, made during a routine interview about his post-political career, revealed that Sunak had been serving as a senior advisor to Thelson Capital Management and as a consultant for California-based fintech startup BrightLedger since October 2022, positions he apparently saw no conflict with his role governing the United Kingdom through what he described as ‘an admittedly challenging period’.
According to documents seen by Made Up News, Sunak was contractually obligated to attend weekly strategy calls with Thelson on Wednesday afternoons and provide quarterly presentations to BrightLedger’s board, commitments that coincided with Prime Minister’s Questions and several crucial Cabinet meetings respectively.
“Looking back, that would explain the Zoom calls during PMQs,” said Dr Rebecca Hamilton, a former special advisor who worked in Downing Street from 2022 to 2024. “We kept hearing him say ‘sorry, you’re on mute’ to Keir Starmer. At the time we assumed it was some sort of experimental debating technique.”
The revelation has also clarified several previously inexplicable policy decisions, including the government’s aborted attempt to make Wednesday afternoons a national half-day and Sunak’s mysterious insistence that all ministerial briefings be delivered in ‘slide deck format with clear KPIs and deliverables’.
Sources close to the former Prime Minister suggest he approached all three roles with the same level of diligent inattention, arriving late to meetings, leaving early, and frequently appearing to have prepared for entirely different discussions. Colleagues at both Thelson and BrightLedger reportedly assumed his distracted manner was due to the pressures of high finance, whilst Cabinet ministers put it down to the weight of office.
“We just thought he was very tired,” said James Mitchell, who served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Sunak. “There were times when he’d reference hedge fund strategies in the middle of discussing NHS funding, but we’d been in government since 2010. Everyone was saying strange things by that point.”
Thelson Capital Management declined to comment on whether they had noticed their senior advisor was simultaneously running a G7 nation, though sources suggest his quarterly performance reviews noted he ‘could benefit from improved time management’ and ‘seemed unusually preoccupied with polling data for someone in wealth management’.
When asked whether juggling three demanding careers had impacted his effectiveness in any of them, Sunak reportedly replied that he felt he had given each role exactly the attention it deserved, a statement that has been interpreted in several different ways depending on one’s perspective.
The Conservative Party said it had no record of being informed about the arrangement, though a spokesperson noted this was ‘broadly consistent with most communication during that period’.