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Britain
The Economist November 6th 2021
→ Also in this section 52 Government v judges 53 Bagehot: Blue Leviathan — Read more at: Economist.com/Britain
Political lobbying
Tory sleaze, again The government has behaved disgracefully in protecting one of its mps from justified censure
T
here are things that democratic gov ernments are not supposed to do. They are not supposed to change the rules of the game at the last minute because they are going to lose. They are not supposed to make it easier to take money for favours. They are not supposed to force mps to do things that make them hang their heads in shame. Yet on November 3rd Boris John son’s government did all this and more. The father of the House, Peter Bottomley, declared that he could not in conscience vote with his party. Younger Tory mps with careers still to make looked embarrassed. On October 26th Parliament’s standards committee issued a damning report on Owen Paterson, a veteran mp and leading Brexiteer. He was guilty of “an egregious case of paid advocacy” and had “brought the House into disrepute”, it said. He should be suspended for 30 days, long enough to trigger a recall if enough voters demanded it. Mr Paterson had lobbied ministers and offi cials on behalf of two companies, Randox, a clinicaldiagnostics fi rm, and Lynn’s Country Foods, a meat
processor and distributor. They paid him more than £100,000 ($137,000) a year be tween them for consulting work. The report brought a furious rebuttal from Mr Paterson and a fusillade of com plaints from his friends in Parliament and the media. They accused the standards commissioner, Kathryn Stone, of bias against Tories, particularly Brexiteers, of having used the twoyearlong inquiry to torment Mr Paterson (his wife, Rose, took her own life during it) and, in the Daily Telegraph, of wearing a nosestud and re fusing to condemn the ira. If the Tories disagreed with the verdict, they could have voted to reject the report or reduce Mr Paterson’s suspension. Instead Dame Andrea Leadsom, a former leader of the Commons, tabled an amendment to create a new committee to fi x “potential defects” in the disciplinary system. The government then used its might to rescue Mr Paterson by imposing a threeline whip on its mps to vote for the amendment. His allies had little to say about the evi dence against him, probably because it was
overwhelming. He had lobbied ministers and offi cials not once but repeatedly, using contacts acquired when he was secretary of state for Northern Ireland and then the en vironment. He used his parliamentary of fi ce for business meetings, and parlia mentheaded notepaper for lobbying. He claimed in his defence that he raised issues of food safety with the Food Standards Agency. But after that he made further at tempts to contact offi cials and to promote “Randox’s superior technology”. The com mittee concluded that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of confusion be tween the private and public interest”. Instead, Mr Paterson’s supporters criti cised the process. Jacob ReesMogg, leader of the house, argued that it had denied him the right of appeal as required by “natural justice”, a phrase he and other Tories used with the reverence of Thomist scholars. In fact, the system off ers several chances for reconsideration—the standards commit tee can reject the commissioner’s report and even if it does not, the House of Com mons has fi nal say. The committee read all the evidence Mr Paterson presented, and no court is obliged to listen to any and all supporters a defendant nominates. Whatever the current system’s failings, the government’s plan was worse. The new committee was to dispense with the inde pendent commissioner and consist entire ly of mps, with a builtin Tory majority. It made a nonsense of Mr ReesMogg’s talk of
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