Tory Veterans Minister took day trip on Armistice Day to movie actuality TV present

Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer took day trip to movie a actuality TV present on Armistice Day final 12 months, the Sunday Mirror can reveal.

The high Tory, who launched Rishi Sunak ’s speech at this 12 months’s Tory Party Conference, was paid to movie a pilot for Channel 4 Documentary collection Banged Up in November 2022. It raises questions for the beneath hearth PM over why a cupboard minister was given permission to take break day for a paid job, value as much as £60,000.

Mr Sunak appointed Mr Mercer to his cupboard simply weeks earlier on October 25 – and Mr Mercer’s division was as a consequence of launch a serious new coverage on one in every of his filming days. The Office For Veterans Affairs was set to unveil a National Veterans Survey, the primary of its sort, on 10 November.

It’s understood a tweet asserting the brand new coverage featured a pre-recorded video of Mr Mercer. Instead of cancelling the agreed look and returning his charge when he was made a minister, Mr Mercer spent days ‘behind bars’ at a simulated jail in Shrewsbury.

He frolicked with ex-convicts who agreed to affix him in jail to offer him a flavour of what life inside is like. Mr Mercer declared a cost of £9,840 to Parliament for “filming a TV programme” a couple of days earlier than filming is known to have begun – including the work would take as much as 32 hours.

And in June this 12 months, he declared an additional £49,200 “broadcast fee for filming already undertaken”. The documentary collection was broadcast final month , racking up greater than 1,000,000 viewers. Mr Mercer wouldn’t affirm the funds, which had been made by way of his expertise company Cloud 9 Management, relate to Banged Up, and declined to touch upon this story.

The Cabinet Office, beneath which Mr Mercer’s Office for Veterans Affairs sits, declined to touch upon the story.

Ministers aren’t usually allowed to simply accept exterior employment as soon as appointed to a authorities function, however are allowed to obtain funds for work carried out previous to taking workplace – resembling e-book royalties. There is nonetheless no suggestion of any wrongdoing on his half.

But that might not apply right here, because the work was carried out after he took workplace. At the identical time as he was filming Banged Up, Mr Mercer’s former ministerial colleague Matt Hancock was beneath hearth for showing on ITV ’s I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here.

While Mr Mercer wasn’t pressured to eat unique animals’ physique components throughout his keep at ‘HMP Shrewsbury’, he was proven smoking a roll-up cigarette which had been smuggled into the jail in one other inmate’s anus. Mr Mercer is proven leaving the jail in the course of the day after not less than one night time inside, alongside a voiceover which stated: “Needing to return to parliamentary duties, Johnny Mercer is being released from HMP Shrewsbury”.

Parliament was not sitting on the time the programme was recorded. But it’s understood Mr Mercer left the jail on 11 November so as to spend the night at rehearsals for the Festival of Remembrance on the Royal Albert Hall, to happen the next day.

The finish titles of the programmes he options in learn: “MP Johnny Mercer’s story was filmed at a separate time to the other stories in this film. He committed to taking part prior to his appointment as a Cabinet Minister.”

A tweet despatched by Mr Mercer on 11 November lists his “7 day highlights” from the previous week – however whereas it lists interventions on highway situations and subsidised bus fares, it doesn’t point out spending 32 hours filming a actuality TV present. The tweet is accompanied by a photograph of Mr Mercer planting a remembrance cross in Parliament for struggle useless from his Plymouth constituency, taken on November seventh.