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Tory sleaze, again
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Political lobbying Tory sleaze, again
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The government has behaved disgracefully in protecting one of its mpsfrom justified censure
There are things that democratic governments are not supposed to do. They processor and distributor. They paid him more than £100,000 ($137,000) a year beare 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 Johnson’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 officials on behalf of two companies, Randox, a clinicaldiagnostics firm, and Lynn’s Country Foods, a meat tween them for consulting work. The report brought a furious rebuttal from Mr Paterson and a fusillade of complaints 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 refusing 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 fix “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 evidence against him, probably because it was overwhelming. He had lobbied ministers and officials not once but repeatedly, using contacts acquired when he was secretary of state for Northern Ireland and then the environment. He used his parliamentary office for business meetings, and parliamentheaded 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 attempts to contact officials and to promote “Randox’s superior technology”. The committee concluded that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of confusion between the private and public interest”.
Instead, Mr Paterson’s supporters criticised 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 offers several chances for reconsideration—the standards committee can reject the commissioner’s report and even if it does not, the House of Commons has final 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 independent commissioner and consist entirely of mps, with a builtin Tory majority. It made a nonsense of Mr ReesMogg’s talk of
