The Fallen Chancellor, George Osborne, recently updated his entry in the register of members interests. He earned, it seems, £82,000 to speak for two hours. I’ve heard George Osborne speak. I don’t want to be wilfully derisory – he isn’t bad at it – but I wouldn’t pay £82,000 for the pleasure. I wouldn’t pay £82. I might stretch to £8.20 – because that’s pretty much what I would pay to watch most things.

Different people have different standards for what is acceptable to spend and to earn. As if it needed saying, I think Mr Osborne and I might have different standards. Just after he left No 11, he and I ended up on the tube together to Euston. There was a moment at Euston where I feared we would be on the same train for our onward journey, as it seemed inevitable that we would have to awkwardly part company where the train demanded we sit with our class. I am the cattle, he is the cream.

In Westminster, we are in the same class – both backbenchers with the same job. It is not his one-off eye-watering speech fees that divide us there, though – it is the other big wedge of £13k per day he earns to work for BlackRock (which sounds like the island bunker where a James Bond baddy lives but is in fact a global investment company).

It can’t be possible that George and I have the same job because mine is full-time – more than full-time in fact, more like 70 hours a week. It is not a four-day-a-week gig. One of us is obviously doing it wrong. I doubt, given the difference in constituencies, he has anywhere like the kind of homelessness, immigration or benefits casework I have to manage.

George Osborne will be paid £13,000 per day as an adviser at global investment firm BlackRock. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

I bet he does fewer surgeries, sees fewer people with complex needs. He doesn’t speak as much in the House as I do, he’s not on committees, like I am. I’ll wager he asks fewer questions and writes fewer reports demanding change (without being paid, I mean). I bet he has fewer staff than me and can therefore pay them more to potentially do less.

However, we do get paid the same.

Osborne’s response, when questioned about treating parliament like a part-time job, drips with entitlement. There is a sense that he feels that, as chancellor, he had to work beneath the level of his rateable value almost as if it were akin to voluntary work. Different standards again, I suppose. For me, and most of my Labour colleagues, being an MP probably meant a significant wage increase. My job prior to parliament earned me half as much and I was still better off then than most people I know.

Where I live, most people, if asked, would say “Hell, yes”, and they would do what Osborne has done. Who wouldn’t want to jump around in cash? The trouble is, they will never have the option.

George got these gigs, not on merit but because he is cashing in on his public office, as if it were not already a massive privilege to have had it. It can’t be merit: I wouldn’t take investment advice from him, since he failed each and every target he set and left the country in an economically more precarious situation. I wouldn’t trust him to give me racing tips.

The old adage – it’s not what you know but who you know – is never truer than among those who have held public office. It would be crass of me not to recognise that I have definitely benefited from it during my short time in the Commons. However, I do my best to share those networks around, to pass the mic and pull others up the ladder.

No one is saying that MPs shouldn’t be able to use their experience to get a job when they leave; of course they should. But George Osborne is making the case that if you want to have another actual job, you should give up the very well paid one you have already in parliament –and not treat it like a hobby.