The stench of Tory sleaze is growing ever stronger

Editorial: Owen Paterson abused his position, according to the Commons authorities – so the Tories have changed the rules

(Dave Brown)

He got away with it – at least for now. It is possible that, in some months’ time, and after some performative, quasi-judicial display, Owen Paterson will indeed have the lobbying allegations against him upheld. He will then end up being suspended from the Commons for 30 days, triggering a ballot for a possible by-election in his safe constituency. Or perhaps he will escape forever the sanctions recommended by the independent commissioner for standards and the Commons cross-party Committee on Standards because his friends in the Conservative Party changed the rules and fixed it for him.

Either way, the damage will be done. Not only will Mr Paterson have brought parliament into disrepute, so will every one of his colleagues, whipped into line on the say-so of Boris Johnson. They change the rules when it suits their own party to rescue a friend. It’s hypocritical. It will do them no good. It stinks.

For Conservatives, and in particular Brexiteers, Mr Paterson is, in the words of a familiar football chant, “one of our own”, and they are defending him on personal and partisan grounds. It is no great shock to see Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrea Leadsom and Iain Duncan Smith rallying round their old Leave comrade, with the blessing of Mr Johnson.

It is a self-interested move in more ways than one. Of the 59 MPs backing the move to let Mr Paterson off, 14 have had allegations against them upheld by the parliamentary commissioner for standards – six of them within the last year.

Some Tory MPs feel Mr Paterson has been judged harshly. Much of this is because he suffered the trauma of the suicide of his wife during the long investigation by the parliamentary commissioner. Mr Paterson suggests it may have been a factor in her untimely death. There is no reason to doubt that it distressed the Paterson family and their friends. Perhaps it dragged on too long. The implication, made more or less explicit by Mr Rees-Mogg, is that Mr Paterson has suffered enough already, without having to face the sanction of suspension from the Commons and the possible loss of his seat and his career (though so safe is his constituency of Shropshire North it is vanishingly unlikely it would ever happen).

Yet it is entirely open to the Commons to show the quality of mercy, and reduce the penalty against Mr Paterson: there is no need to change the rules.

The harsh fact is that the reason why Mr Paterson and his family found themselves going through this agony was because of his own reckless behaviour. That might sound unkind, but it is true. He abused his position, according to the Commons authorities. There may be mitigating circumstances surrounding the sanction now to be applied to him, but the facts of the case are not in doubt. It was not some random act of vindictiveness by a biased bureaucrat; it arose because of his undeclared lobbying.

Mr Paterson did not lobby on behalf of these companies paying him to do so because he or his wife were under mental strain, but for other reasons, possibly connected to the £100,000 in fees he earned. It was hardly inadvertent. As the report stated: “The committee found that Mr Paterson’s actions were an egregious case of paid advocacy, that he repeatedly used his privileged position to benefit two companies for whom he was a paid consultant, and that this has brought the house into disrepute.”

A further, superficially plausible argument put forward by Mr Paterson and his allies is that the process as it stands is inadequate. It is claimed it gives insufficient weight to testimony of “witnesses”, there is no right of appeal, and has none of the same safeguards as there would be in a court of law. There is something in that, though Mr Paterson had ample opportunity to present his case, and the evidence is not much disputed in its fundamentals anyway.

Besides, the same pleas were made during the case against the Labour MP Keith Vaz, facing similar sanctions and with the same kind of legalistic arguments about natural justice and mitigating circumstances, but Mr Vaz found zero sympathy from the Conservative benches. When, by contrast, more recently, another Tory MP, Rob Richards, escaped suspension because of a procedural anomaly, the Conservatives opposed a retrospective change in the rules that would have made him face the usual sanction of suspension from the Commons.

Now, it seems, it is entirely reasonable to bend rules, retrospectively. The middle of an active case is not the time to reform any procedure. That defies natural justice.

At no point in the various comparable cases in the last few years, including against the DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr, Labour MP Fiona Onasanya, Conservative backbencher Chris Davies and Mr Vaz, has the process been seriously up for reform halfway through. This time, when a prominent ex-cabinet minister and leading Brexiteer is faced with ruin, suddenly the demand for natural justice and reform becomes imperative and immediate. It is no longer a matter of conscience but a government policy. If Mr Paterson was treated unfairly, then so were Mr Paisley, Ms Onasanya, Mr Davies, Mr Vaz and many others since the independent commissioner was established after a previous bout of sleaze, also under a Conservative government, in 1995. Perhaps Mr Paisley et al could also have their cases reviewed under the new “fairer” rules.

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As for an appeals process, the Commons committee on standards or the Commons itself can vote for any sanction it wishes, or none, and to reject the report and recommendations. Instead, presumably because that would be just far too blatant a course of action, they are hiding behind a bogus “review”. They’re fooling nobody.

Angela Rayner, making the most of Mr Johnson’s embarrassment, put it simply in Prime Minister’s Questions: “This isn’t about playing politics, this is about playing by the rules.” So it is, but the saddest thing is that the general public expects little better from its political establishment. The names of those in public life who have found themselves mired in such controversies about ethics and personal standards of behaviour lately is a depressingly long one: David Cameron, Robert Jenrick, Dominic Cummings, Priti Patel, Matt Hancock, Ben Elliot, and indeed Mr Johnson himself. Soon the independent parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, will probably quit in protest, as the prime minister’s adviser on ministerial conduct, Alex Allan, did a year ago.

Mr Johnson is being pushed around again by the worst of his backbenchers, and, as usual, hopes that there will be little immediate political fallout from a public more worried about Covid, the planet and the economy. That might be so, but the growing impression of a political party wallowing in sleaze isn’t ever going to be an electoral bonus, as the Conservatives discovered in 1997, the last time they grew so complacent and sleazy in power.