Latest updates: party says government ministers being encouraged to ‘vote for return to the worst of 90s sleaze culture’
Good morning. It is almost 30 years since the cash for questions scandal, which revealed how MPs were using their status as parliamentarians for personal gain. It led to the creation of the committee on standards in public life and a major overhaul of the rules governing what MPs are and are not allowed to do. Over the last three decades the system has been criticised, and amended, but by and large it has survived with cross-party support. But today Boris Johnson and the Conservatives seem ready to blow that consensus apart by voting for an overhaul of the system that would protect Owen Paterson, the Tory former cabinet minister, from a 30-day suspension for breaking lobbying rules.
The cross-party Commons standards committee recommended the punishment, on the basis of the findings of an investigation from Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards. Since the end of the second world war, disciplinary recommendations from this committee or its predecessors have almost always been accepted by the Commons as a whole, normally without a vote. For a standards committee finding to be rejected as comprehensively as is being proposed today is thought to be unprecedented.
It is shocking that government ministers are being encouraged to vote for a return to the worst of the 1990s Tory sleaze culture. A vote for this amendment would turn the clock back to the era of Neil Hamilton, cash for questions and no independent standards process.
Let’s not forget that the cross-party standards committee, including three Tory MPs, endorsed the commissioner’s 30 day sanction for a breach of the rule around paid advocacy.
