What do disgraced turn-of-the-millennium politicians do for a second act?

[I'll admit I'm getting a little repetitive.]

Chekhov said a good ending should be surprising but, in retrospect, inevitable. The following is probably more the second than the first, but I will admit it caught me off guard.

FT's irreplaceable Jemima Kelly fills in the details:

The last time you heard of Newt Gingrich was probably when the former Speaker of the US House of Representatives was calling for the arrest of poll workers in his home state of Pennsylvania following the “corrupt, stolen election” of 2020, or when he was writing op-eds refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden as president. 

 Or maybe it was way back during his unsuccessful bid to become the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 2012. When he spent time telling supporters in Barack Obama’s home state that “we need an American president . . . with American values” and defending the Birther movement (all while his campaign was busy racking up debts of $4.6m that still, nine years later, haven’t been paid back). 

Well, guess what, Newt’s back, baby. 

 And where do unsuccessful Republican presidential hopefuls go when they’re all out of options? Well cryptoland, of course! (Remember fellow 2012 hopeful Rick Santorum’s crypto coin for Catholics? You’re welcome.) 

 But not just any crypto will do for Newt — as it turns out, he is something of a bitcoin maximalist. He has just become an adviser at the International Bitcoin Advisory Corporation (IBAC), a new Israel-based firm run by former banker and “futurist” Avi Ifergan. IBAC describes itself as “an outfit built to serve central banks and sovereign wealth funds with all their digital assets investment needs”; their “vision is to accelerate the rate of bitcoin and other digital assets adoption among governmental institutions”. What could possibly go wrong, etc. 

A short interview follows if Newt is someone you really want to hear more from.