Tory sleaze to now haunt Boris Johnson – Bill Carmichael

Well, even the man at the centre of the storm, former Northern Ireland Minister Owen Paterson, admitted this week that his party had taken a “political hit” before he announced that he was quitting as a MP.

Owen Paterson lobbying scandal destroys Nolan rules – The Yorkshire Post says

That is a heck of an understatement – the decision caused such an uproar across the political spectrum that the Government was yesterday forced into a humiliating U-turn.

Time will tell if there’s another vote on the Paterson suspension, and whether reform of the standards procedures can take place with cross-party support. To say it has been a chaotic shambles is no exaggeration.

The damage has been done. Once the idea of “Tory sleaze” gains traction with the public it is all but impossible to reverse that impression – as John Major discovered in the 1990s.

Come the next General Election, every MP who voted to block the suspension can expect to be constantly reminded of the fact, not only by their political opponents, but from ordinary folk on the doorstep too.

Before I write another word let’s make one thing clear; no one should have anything but sympathy with Mr Paterson for the loss of his wife Rose, who took her own life last year.

But Conservative MPs allowed their compassion towards a fellow member to cloud their judgment.

Kathryn Stone, the independent Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, found that the now former MP had breached Commons rules by lobbying for two private firms that paid him over £100,000 a year.

An all-party committee of MPs considered her findings and recommended that Mr Paterson be suspended from Parliament for a period of 30 days – a move that would have led to a by-election in his North Shropshire constituency.

The committee chairman, Labour MP Chris Bryant, told MPs that Mr Paterson had lobbied Ministers time and again in a way that benefited his paying clients. “That is expressly forbidden. It is corrupt practice,” he said.

But MPs, backed by the Government, initially voted not only to block the suspension, but to junk the entire system of investigating standards breaches and replace it with a new one. That decision has now been reversed.

Mr Paterson denies any wrongdoing and his supporters say the system is unfair, as he was not allowed to call witnesses in his defence and had no right of appeal.

There might be some merit in these arguments and many MPs point out there have been misgivings about the standards system for some time.

But as the Government now acknowledges, now is not the time to make such a change. You don’t change the rules of the game when you are 3-0 down at half-time. It is far better for Mr Paterson to accept his punishment and for MPs then to review the system in a dispassionate manner.

Now that a by-election will be taking place – albeit without Mr Paterson’s name on the ballot paper after saying he wanted to leave “the cruel world of politics” – I suspect we will hear a lot about sleaze and corruption in the coming months.

However it is worth remembering that the UK is a very “clean” country when compared to not just the developing world but advanced western countries too.

According to an international league table of 180 countries around the world compiled by an organisation called Transparency International, the UK is the 11th least corrupt country in the world, ahead of France, the United States, Portugal, Spain, the Irish Republic and Italy.

So to suggest we are “wallowing in sleaze” is a bit of an exaggeration. There is, however, no room for complacency,
so it is incumbent on MPs to devise a system to investigate their own conduct that is independent, fair and rigorous – and that they don’t keep changing the rules every time they don’t like the 
ruling.

And I suspect the Government’s cack-handed attempt to effectively abolish the standards system in order to get one of their MPs off the hook will still return to return to bite them on the backside at election time.

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today. Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you’ll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app, receive exclusive members-only offers and access to all premium content and columns. Click here to subscribe.