There are a whole bunch of ways that one may acquire brownie points, such as donations to the party coffers, assistance in a national election or byelection, homosexual blackmail of prominent politicians, civil servants who have hit the promotional ceiling and are retiring and need a new source of income and so on and so on.
The ways in British politics are endless to peerages, and even better, to be appointed to quangos. These have even better salaries, less work, less time required, and often result in mundane or inconvenient fact finding trips to the Caribbean in winter and to Scottish or Canadian hunting and fishing lodges in the summer.
Isn't the same true in our country?