PMQs: Boris Johnson prescribes dose of amnesia in defence of Tory MP

Parliament this week welcomed back Rob Roberts MP, suspended earlier this year after an independent panel found he made repeated and unwanted sexual advances towards a member of staff. He has not had the Tory whip restored, but is back in the Conservative Party, sits on the government side of the chamber and votes in line with them. Today, the government is instructing its MPs to back an amendment that would overturn a 30-day suspension of Tory MP Owen Paterson for breaching lobbying rules. Angela Rayner, standing in for a self-isolating Keir Starmer, understandably led on standards in politics at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Paterson was found by the Commons standards committee to have broken rules by making approaches to officials and ministers on behalf of Randox and Lynn’s Country Foods, which employed him as a paid consultant. He received tens of thousands of pounds for this work. The 30-day suspension would trigger a recall petition that, if signed by 10% of his constituents, would result in a by-election. “If it was a police officer, a teacher, a doctor, we would expect the independent process to be followed and not changed after the verdict. It’s one rule for them and one rule for the rest of them,” Rayner told MPs. Johnson conceded that “paid lobbying in this House is wrong” but said the issue in this case is “whether a member of this House had a fair opportunity to make representations in this case”.

Johnson is now attempting to do exactly what the government recently said it could not do: change the system for investigating MPs in light of the outcome of a particular case. As a result of a loophole, Roberts escaped a recall petition because his suspension was recommended by the ‘independent expert panel’, rather than the standards committee. The government closed the loophole earlier this year, but Conservatives rejected a bid by Labour to make the change retrospective. “They said the rules couldn’t be changed after the event. So they can’t change the rule to stop sexual harassment, but they can change the rules to allow cash for access,” Rayner pointed out. “Why is the Prime Minister making it up as he goes along?”

Johnson today urged MPs to approach the Paterson case in a “spirit of fairness” – a spirit that conveniently allows the governing party to protect one of its members from suspension, and then flip their own logic to defend another. A feat that requires a large dose of social amnesia. Will it come back to bite the Tories? The deputy Labour leader warned that “if you keep cheating the public, it catches up with you in the end”. While the two cases certainly leave Conservative MPs with an awkward position to defend, unfortunately that does not necessarily mean Rayner’s warning will prove true at the ballot box.

The Conservatives are good at protecting their mates. They are currently weathering numerous allegations of Tory sleaze, from Covid contracts to sexual harassment. Their brazen conduct today is shocking, but not surprising. Notably, the amendment has implications beyond Paterson. It would establish a new committee of nine MPs, mostly appointed by the government, tasked with proposing changes to the standards committee system and thereby rigging the process for investigating MPs for the future. Tories are again showing an incredible capacity, in the face of any sense of ‘fairness’, to protect their own.