A former Conservative deputy prime minister who lost her seat at the last general election applied for a job in Labour’s Treasury department.
Thérèse Coffey also had a stint as the health secretary and was one of Liz Truss’s fiercest allies when she was prime minister.
Coffey, who is one of more than 200 former Conservative MPs forging a new career after Labour’s landslide election victory cost them their seats, applied to become the UK director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Telegraph reported.
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, who has been highly critical of Truss’s premiership and the Conservatives who backed her, ultimately decides who gets the job, as the candidate who gets the director-level role will work under her.
The role Coffey applied for was advertised on LinkedIn by the Treasury in July, with the posting saying the position would include “representing the UK and promoting the UK’s interests at the EBRD board in a credible and effective manner”.
It comes with a £183,400 annual salary and would require the successful candidate to work with Treasury policy teams and the Foreign Office to “devise and implement a proactive strategic agenda for UK priorities”.
However, Coffey was unsuccessful. She told the Telegraph: “It was an interesting role. I thought I would apply given my experience in government on international work. I have dealt with these sorts of banks before.”
It is very unusual for a senior Conservative to apply for such a role under a Labour government. Coffey held a number of roles throughout her political career, including being the deputy Commons leader, and she served on the culture, media and sport committee until she was appointed as the parliamentary private secretary to Michael Fallon, who was at the time a business minister.
The EBRD, formed in 1991, is a development bank that gives loans to companies and is owned by 73 countries, including the UK, which fund it.
In effect Reeves is the senior representative for the UK, and each of the 73 countries has its own delegate.
In order to stop any repeats of Truss’s disastrous 2022 mini-budget, Reeves gave the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) new powers last month to stop any future government from shunning its forecasts when making any major taxation or spending announcement.
In September 2022 as part of her 45-day stint as prime minister Truss announced £45bn of unfunded tax cuts, which spooked financial markets and led mortgage rates to soar.
Earlier this month Reeves welcomed a cut in interest rates but said “millions of people are still paying higher mortgage rates”.
Coffey was made a dame under Rishi Sunak’s dissolution honours list, which was announced less than an hour before polls closed at the general election.
The former MP for Suffolk Coastal lost her seat to Labour’s Jennifer Riddell-Carpenter.