Why has Owen Paterson resigned? He faced the prospect of a 30-day suspension from the House of Commons – a penalty that appeared to have been lifted on Wednesday, at least temporarily, after Boris Johnson backed an attempt to tear up parliament’s anti-sleaze system. On Wednesday Paterson said he looked forward to trying to clear his name after being found to have lobbied the government on behalf of companies that were paying him more than £100,000. But after Johnson withdrew his support, Paterson’s hopes of being allowed to reopen his case evaporated. In his statement he also said he feared his wife’s suicide becoming a “political football”. He has previously linked her death to the investigation into his conduct. What had the government announced? A complete 180-degree U-turn on its position on Wednesday night. Ministers will now table a new motion – probably as soon as early next week – unpicking the one passed on Wednesday. Wednesday’s motion paused judgment on the Paterson lobbying case while a cross-party committee examined the Commons’ standards system with a view to establishing some kind of appeals process. The committee was to be chaired by the former culture secretary John Whittingdale. He was investigated by a previous parliamentary commissioner for standards over a trip to the MTV Europe awards in Amsterdam in 2013 with his then girlfriend, a dominatrix sex worker. The motion protecting Paterson was passed after Boris Johnson whipped Conservative MPs to support it – a highly unusual decision that Labour’s Keir Starmer called “corrupt”. Why did Johnson change his mind? According to Johnson’s spokesperson, it was because he realised the plans for a committee set out in the Andrea Leadsom amendment he backed on Wednesday could not go ahead once Labour and the SNP had said they would boycott it. But No 10 had also faced a significant backlash from Tory MPs about what they saw as the grubbiness of the manoeuvre, which conflated Paterson’s position with broader issues about the system for policing MPs’ behaviour. Johnson is also notoriously fixated on newspaper headlines, and on Thursday even the usually supportive Daily Mail called the move to protect Paterson “shameless”. What would have happened to Paterson if he had not stepped aside? He announced on Thursday afternoon that he would now step down from parliament rather than face the potential humiliation of a byelection. The government had planned to table a motion early next week to unpick Wednesday’s vote by reinstating Paterson’s suspension and dissolving the mooted cross-party committee. It was not planning to whip MPs, but given that Leadsom’s amendment only passed with a narrow majority of 18 on a three-line Conservative whip, the motion undoing it would have been highly likely to pass. Paterson’s 30-day suspension was long enough to have triggered the parliamentary recall process. That means if 10% of his constituents signed a petition, a byelection would have to be held. What will happen to Paterson’s North Shropshire constituency? In accordance with arcane parliamentary procedure, in order to surrender his seat on the green benches Paterson will have to be formally appointed to one of two historic non-jobs, crown steward and bailiff of either the Chiltern Hundreds or the Manor of Northstead. A byelection will then be scheduled and could take place within weeks. While he won the seat with a thumping majority of more than 22,000 in 2019, opposition parties are likely to campaign hard on the issue of sleaze. Dates have not yet been set for two other byelections in Conservative-held seats, Southend West, whose MP David Amess was stabbed to death last month, and Old Bexley and Sidcup, the constituency of the former minister James Brokenshire, who recently died of cancer. Opposition parties have agreed not to stand candidates in Southend West out of respect for Amess’s memory. Will parliament’s anti-sleaze system still be replaced? That is unclear. Announcing the government’s dramatic change of position on Thursday morning, the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said the government still believed there was a case for an appeals process to be introduced. He conceded, however, that it had been wrong to link calls for reforms to the process to an individual case, and he promised to seek cross-party consensus on the way forward. He did not specify whether that would take place through the existing cross-party parliamentary standards committee, chaired by Chris Bryant, or in some other forum. There is still likely to have to be a House of Commons vote to undo the results of Wednesday’s motion.