The Economist November 6th 2021 51
BritainPoliticallobbying
Tory sleaze, again
T
here arethings 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 officials on behalf of two
companies, Randox, a clinicaldiagnostics
firm, 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 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 evi
dence against him, probably because it wasoverwhelming. 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 en
vironment. He used his parliamentary of
fice 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 officials 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 offers 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 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 inde
pendent commissioner and consist entire
ly of mps, with a builtin Tory majority. It
made a nonsense of Mr ReesMogg’s talk ofThe government has behaved disgracefully in protecting one of its mps from
justified censure
→Alsointhissection
52 Governmentv judges
53 Bagehot:BlueLeviathan
— Read more at: Economist.com/Britain