Matt Hancock and Kwasi Kwarteng ask for £10,000-a-day to work for FAKE company

Two former Tory ministers have been caught in a sting telling a non-existent company their daily rate for consultancy is £10,000 a day. MPs Matt Hancock and Kwasi Kwarteng were caught on video requesting six-figure sums for what they would expect to be paid to advise a fake firm in South Korea.

The sting was set up by campaign group Led By Donkeys, with the clips since shared widely on social media, causing embarrassment for the senior MPs.

During the fake interview, Mr Hancock, asked whether he had a daily rate for his services, said: “I do, yes. It is 10,000 sterling.” The Conservative former health secretary, who was stripped of the party whip by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after he was announced as a contestant in last year’s series of ITV reality programme I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, later said he had an hourly rate of “around £1,500”.

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Former chancellor during Liz Truss's time as Prime Minister, Mr Kwarteng, when asked the same question, said: “I would say as an MP, obviously I don’t need to earn a king’s ransom. But I wouldn’t do anything less than for about 10,000 dollars a month." Mr Kwarteng, whose mini-budget in September sent the value of the pound tumbling and mortgage rates soaring, went on to clarify that he would prefer the rate to be in pound sterling.

Told by someone pretending to be an employee of the company they were considering offering between £8,000 and £12,000 per day, with the intention for him to attend six board meetings a year, Mr Kwarteng said: “OK yes, we’re not a million miles off. We can work with the numbers.”

Labour accused Tory MPs of using “their taxpayer funded offices to