A Downing Street aide elevated to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson earned £2 million in a year from clients including the former prime minister.
Johnson’s decision to nominate the political adviser Ross Kempsell for a peerage at the age of 31 in the outgoing leader’s resignation honours caused incredulity.
Accounts filed with Companies House show how Lord Kempsell, a former journalist and the youngest male peer in the Lords, who is also a friend of Carrie Johnson, the former prime minister’s wife, cashed in after he was nominated.
Hyannis Strategy, a personal service company with just three clients, increased its assets from £1 to £2.06 million between July 2022, a week after Johnson’s resignation, and October last year.
When asked about the source of the money, Kempsell said it “comes from media consulting work that I did before I entered the House of Lords” in July last year.
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The news comes after Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, the youngest life peer in parliamentary history when appointed aged 30, declared that she accepted a paid job as vice-president in Better Earth Limited, where Boris Johnson is chairman. The firm, set up by a Canadian uranium miner, will advise companies and countries on energy transformation.
Kempsell listed Hyannis’s “current clients” as the private office of the former prime minister, Policy Exchange, a think tank, and the television channel GB News in his Lords’ register of interests.
It is understood that he had a number of other private clients between July 31, 2022, and July 11 last year, which do not need to be disclosed under Lords rules.
The company is described as a “personal service company providing the member’s own services in communications, media, management advice and journalism”.
He was rewarded with the peerage as one of Johnson’s most loyal servants, acting as a key figure in “Operation Save Big Dog”, the internal battle to prop up Johnson around a confidence vote in June 2022.
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He also stuck by the former prime minister after he was forced to resign, acting as his paid press representative through the year-long investigation into lockdown parties at No 10 by the privileges committee, which reported in June last year.
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Johnson did not claim the £115,000 allowance granted to former prime ministers in 2022-23, although it is not yet known whether he claimed the public money the year after.
Johnson declared a donation of more than £1 million from Christopher Harborne, an investor in crypto and aviation fuel, based in Thailand, to his private office, the same limited company that paid Kempsell.
After graduating from Cambridge University in 2013, Kempsell worked as a journalist for the right-wing news website Guido Fawkes, TalkRadio and Times Radio, and did a spell as a political adviser in No 10’s policy unit.
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His appointment as a director of the Conservative research department prompted controversy as senior Tories lambasted Johnson for the appointment of a “political novice” and accused the former prime minister of cronyism for giving the job to a close friend of his wife.
A source close to Kempsell insisted he had leveraged contacts made during his time working as director of the research department, including senior figures in media, and he had not taken on further clients since entering the Lords.
Official filings reveal he has set up a series of other companies. Maple Research is an investigative “business intelligence” firm, which is co-owned with Hawthorn Advisors, the consultancy founded by the former Tory chairman Ben Elliott.
Kempsell is said to be expanding networks in Qatar and Bahrain and his register of interests reveals that he attended the royal box at the Royal Windsor Horse Show in May at the expense of the Bahraini embassy, and that the Qatari government paid for him to go to a conference in Doha.
Kempsell made 33 appearances in the Lords in his first ten months, eschewing fees for the first eight of them. He collected £3,857 in March and April this year, the last two months disclosed.
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He has been a prolific writer of parliamentary questions, filing 67 in a year, and is campaigning to exempt military families from Labour’s plan to impose VAT on independent school fees.
