Why the Owen Paterson suspension vote matters

The House of Commons has been accused of trying to “jettison the system that governs it” as ministers plotted to overthrow the findings of a parliamentary standards investigation into a Tory grandee.

Boris Johnson backed an “unprecedented” bid to overturn the six-week suspension of Owen Paterson, a former environment secretary under David Cameron, for breaking lobbying rules, reported The Guardian.

Tory MPs voted in favour of pausing the suspension today, which could pave the way to set up a new Conservative-led committee to review the evidence.

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The accusations

The independent parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, opened an investigation two years ago into media reports that Paterson had lobbied on behalf of two companies for which he was a paid consultant.

The inquiry findings were published last month by Stone, a former chief legal ombudsman whose appointment was approved by the Commons in 2017. She concluded that Paterson had breached the rules prohibiting paid advocacy in his work for diagnostics company Randox and meat distributor Lynn’s Country Foods, which together paid him more than £100,000 a year.

The Commons Select Committee on Standards – made up of three Conservative MPs, two Labour MPs, one SNP MP and seven lay members – unanimously recommended that Paterson be suspended from the House for 30 sitting days. A fourth Tory MP, Sir Bernard Jenkin, who sits on the committee recused himself on the basis that he is a friend of Paterson.

The others called Paterson's actions “an egregious case of paid advocacy”, in which he “repeatedly used his privileged position to benefit two companies for whom he was a paid consultant”. This had “brought the House into disrepute”, the committee said.

A vote in favour of this recommendation by MPs this afternoon would have triggered a recall ballot in his North Shropshire constituency, which might have resulted in a by-election. Instead, the motion was amended to put his suspension on hold.

Paterson’s defence

Paterson has claimed that Stone’s “Kafkaesque” investigation contributed to the suicide of his wife, Rose, in June 2020.

The details are “complex and technical”, said The Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey, but his defence is that he engaged with ministers and officials to safeguard public health.

The MP, first elected in 1997, suggested to Tominey that the committee’s findings would have been struck down if he had been able to call his own witnesses, cross-examine his accusers and be represented by expert lawyers.

“MPs accused of misconduct have no ability to challenge an unfair process before the courts as any other employee of any company would be able to do,” said Paterson, who called for a “complete overhaul of the way allegations about the conduct of MPs are investigated”.

The next move

Paterson’s supporters took heed and tabled a series of amendments to today’s motion to suspend him, “seeking to change the process because they believe that he has not received natural justice”, reported The Times.

One of the amendments, backed by Andrea Leadsom, proposed pausing the Paterson case and creating a new committee to reconsider the verdict. This new committee would be led by former minister John Whittingdale, “who has shared the Conservative benches with Paterson for almost 25 years”.

The move would be a “remarkable rebuke of the standards process by MPs”, the paper said this morning, noting that only two attempts had ever been made to intervene with such suspensions and both failed. But this afternoon the amendment was backed in the Commons by 250 votes to 232.

The committee view

Chris Bryant, the Labour chair of the Commons Select Committee on Standards, insists Paterson “has been treated fairly”.

In an article in The Telegraph today and speaking in the Commons, he noted that the commissioner and the committee carefully considered the 17 witness statements from Paterson and offered to meet him in person.

“The biggest problem for Mr Paterson is that the facts that he provided speak for themselves,” wrote Bryant. His own emails point to “paid lobbying”, Bryant added.

“Paterson could have returned six months’ worth of his fees from Randox and Lynn’s Foods, and ceased to work for them, to release himself from the lobbying rules. He chose not to do so.”

The significance

Paterson is a “popular colleague” and a “grieving husband”, but he must face the penalty for breaking the rules, wrote Ian Birrell in the Daily Mail ahead of the vote. “If MPs absolve him today, it would be the demeaning of democracy.”

We must “hope our representatives do their duty”, despite a “vociferous campaign” by the former minister’s friends to dilute his punishment, said Birrell. “Anything less would insult voters – and, once again, chip away at the electorate’s wobbling faith in Westminster after yet another lobbying scandal.”

Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy accused the Conservatives of adopting a “one rule for everybody else and another rule for them” mentality.

She told Sky News that while some of her constituents had been hit with large fines and no right of appeal for making mistakes on Universal Credit claims, Commons members were trying to “jettison the system that governs it” over an MP who broke parliamentary rules.

But The Telegraph editorial board thought “legitimate concerns” had been raised about the fairness of the process.

The paper argued that “a temporary hiatus” would allow “MPs to consider whether the rules need reforming and give Mr Paterson the chance to show where he thinks he has been traduced”.