Law chief didn’t declare £400k pay (but DID charge us 49p for milk)

THE new Attorney General once forgot to declare £400,000 in earnings as a barrister – but claimed 49p for a pint of milk on his MPs’ expenses.

Millionaire QC Geoffrey Cox, 58, is said to be the highest-earning MP in Parliament.

The Brexit-supporting MP for Torridge and West Devon was appointed on Monday to take over from Jeremy Wright, who was appointed Culture Secretary in the reshuffle.

He emerged from the backbench 1922 committee meeting on Monday to urge colleagues to back Theresa May and her Chequers deal.

Mr Cox has now agreed to ditch his lucrative legal career to take up his new frontbench role because the rules say he cannot earn money from outside work while he is a minister. In 2016, it emerged that he earned almost as much as Premier League footballer Jamie Vardy. Mr Cox, who is head of Thomas More Chambers, earned around £800,000 that year for his extra work on top of his MP’s salary, then £74,000 a year.

In 2016, he apologised to MPs for a ‘serious breach’ of parliamentary rules after forgetting to declare about £400,000 in outside earnings between January and August 2015. The payments were far in excess of the £66 limit MPs could earn at the time before they had to declare them.

Despite the ‘significant’ scale of the offence, he faced no further sanction from Parliament’s standards committee.

Mr Cox did, however, remember to claim 49p on his MPs’ expenses for a pint of milk and a £2 box of teabags. The claim was rejected.