This squalid episode is not a one-off but the latest exhibition of the rule-breaking pathology of the Johnson government
Boris Johnson is a law unto himself. His housemaster at Eton noted his belief that he should be treated as “an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”. He rarely encounters a rule without feeling the urge to break it. Know this and you are well on the way to understanding why the government engaged in grubby scheming to undermine parliament’s anti-corruption safeguards, then brutish bullying of Tory MPs to make them follow the prime minister’s orders, before the intensity of the backlash forced an abject retreat over the Owen Paterson affair.
For what cause did Mr Johnson bring so much opprobrium, humiliation and recrimination on his government’s head? The independent commissioner for parliamentary standards found Mr Paterson guilty of serial and egregious breaches of the rules when he lobbied ministers and officials on behalf of two companies together paying him more than a £100,000 a year. The all-party standards committee agreed that he had brought parliament into disrepute. Three of its four Conservative MPs endorsed that verdict. The fourth recused himself because he was a close friend of the accused. The committee recommended a 30-day suspension from the Commons, a sanction that many looking on from outside will consider lenient. In the normal world, bringing your employer into disrepute is customarily a sackable offence. The suicide of his wife engendered sympathy among MPs and perhaps his constituents too. Had he expressed contrition and accepted his punishment, rather than defiantly insisting that he was innocent and would do it all again, many of his colleagues think Mr Paterson would have stood a good chance of carrying on as an MP.
