LET me declare an interest. I don’t like Sir Malcolm Rifkind — the pompous politician who has thankfully fallen on his sword after an excellent sting operation by Channel 4 Dispatches.

The programme did a good job of exposing Rifkind’s avarice and arrogance to being an elected member of Parliament — something I have experienced in person.

In December 2008, he became a leading spokesman of the Global Zero movement which includes over 300 eminent leaders and over 400,000 citizens from around the world working toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons by multilateral negotiation.

Yet in backing Trident’s renewal, he seemed to be directly contradicting this organisation.

Last year he co-chaired a House of Commons press launch for the Trident Commission. I asked from the floor how he and his co-chair Lib Dem grandee Sir Menzies Campbell could, as international lawyers, support renewing Trident?

Its procurement from the United States is in breach of Britain’s legal obligations under both Article 1 (prohibiting the transfer of nuclear explosive devices to any recipient) and Article 6 (requiring all member states to conduct negotiations on nuclear disarmament) of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Rifkind looked at me as if he had stepped in something nasty and smelly on the pavement, ignored my question, and let Campbell attempt an answer.

That is the measure of Rifkind — loquacious until struck dumb by somebody prepared to challenge him on his own area of supposed expertise.

Among the jaw-dropping comments Rifkind made to Channel 4’s undercover reporters was the claim that he did not receive a salary — even though he is paid over £67,000 a year to be an MP.

Trying to extricate himself from the hole he had dug for himself, he actually made this worse by letting slip he considered a salary of £67,000 was insufficient for a man of his background. He was entitled to much more, he opined.

On his own constituency website he states: “Members of Parliament are elected to the House of Commons to represent the interests and concerns of all the people who live in their constituency, whether they voted for them at the general election or not. They are only able to deal with issues raised by people who live in their constituency, called constituents.”

Apparently this rule on “only dealing with issues raised by constituents” did not apply to meeting with lobbyists offering money to him to ask questions of ministers, officials or serving ambassadors, for a fat fee of £5,000-£8,000 a day, as he told the reporters.

That fee would be about a third of the annual income of many constituents in the north of his constituency. Many erroneously think his entire Kensington seat in west London is super affluent. Maybe Sir Malcolm did too, and never ventured too far north to see the real poverty there.

However he has happily ventured into very valuable, well-remunerated consultancies and directorships, earning an extra £69,610 last year according to his latest entry in the register of members financial interests, published by Parliament on February 2.

As he told the reporters, he had plenty of free time to undertake extra-parliamentary fee-earning, as well as walking and reading.

Looking at his record as an MP, it’s hard to find evidence of him paying much attention to the role. Since the formation of the coalition government nearly five years ago he asked

just one written question to government on behalf of his constituents.

But Sir Malcolm knows how to be active when he wants to be. Here is an extract from an article in the Independent nine years ago:

“Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, undertook to lobby the US vice-president Dick Cheney in an attempt to land a lucrative oil contract in Iraq for BHP Billiton, according to evidence given to a public inquiry in Australia.

“In the most blatant evidence to so far emerge about Western businesses jockeying for a slice of Iraq’s oil wealth, the Anglo-Australian group BHP Billiton drew up a plan for getting access to the huge Iraqi Halfayah oil field just weeks after outbreak of war in 2003.

“BHP Billiton held a secret meeting in May 2003 in London with Sir Malcolm — who has worked as a consultant to the company since 1997 — and Alexander Downer, the Australian foreign minister, to discuss how best to convince the Americans that BHP Billiton should be handed the Halfayah field in southern Iraq.

“The evidence came to light as part of a Royal Commission inquiry started late last year in Australia to examine any involvement of the country’s businesses in breaching the sanctions that were in place against Iraq before the war.”

The minutes from the secret the meeting reveal that oil giant Shell and Tigris Petroleum, a joint venture set up by BHP Billiton and some of its former executives, were also interested in “securing the Halfayah field investment.”

According to The Independent, the confidential minutes stated that “Sir Malcolm emphasised that it was critical to register the BHP Billiton/British Dutch (Shell)/Tigris interest early with the US administration … It was a good claim and required lobbying — including from the Australian government — in Washington.”

The document also said that BHP Billiton had briefed the office of Australia’s prime minister, adding that “it has only just started lobbying in the UK but intended to approach Downing Street and the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry).”

Last year Sir Malcolm was appointed chairman of the World Economic Forum’s nuclear security council. Just last month, he was appointed by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) as a member of their eminent persons panel on European security. Let’s hope he has been sacked from both.

Laughably, in 2009-10 he was considered an eminent enough MP to chair the standards and privileges committee of the House of Commons. To think he was considered fit to chair Parliament’s “intelligence” committee too.

Mark Hollingsworth’s excellent book MPs for Hire, published in 1991 dubs the type of behaviour exhibited by Rifkind as “pork-barrel politics.”

Veteran Labour MP Paul Flynn told the BBC this week that some MPs have got their body so far into the trough, all you can see is the soles of their Gucci shoes. Bye, bye “Sir” Malcolm.

Now he is gone for good, unless the Tories dare nominate him for a peerage. Surely they wouldn’t, would they?

This article was first published by Open Democracy at http://bit.ly/1zrqN6u