For Kathryn Stone, parliament’s sleaze watchdog, Thursday began bleakly. The business secretary called for her to consider her position. After parliament voted to overturn her investigation into Owen Paterson’s lobbying breaches, it was “difficult to see what the future of the commissioner was”, Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, told breakfast radio. But then within a few frantic hours Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, appeared safe. The government made a U-turn, Paterson resigned, and Stone was being urged to use her position to investigate Boris Johnson’s interior decorations.
Some see Stone, whose job is to consider alleged breaches of the MPs’ code of conduct, as one of the key targets of Downing Street’s botched operation to save Paterson and change parliament’s ethics system through making the ruling party judge and jury over allegations of corruption and ethical failures. She has repeatedly found herself investigating the prime minister’s personal finances, and Johnson has been admonished on several occasions. Most recently the issue was his paid-for Caribbean holiday to Mustique at Christmas 2019, although he was later cleared by the Commons’ committee on standards. In 2019, he apologised for the late registration of a one-fifth share of a rental property in Somerset, worth more than £100,000, after a complaint was made to Stone. In 2018 he was found to have failed to declare more than £52,000 in income from book royalty payments in time. Dominic Cummings, until a year ago Johnson’s chief adviser in Downing Street, described Wednesday’s vote to dismantle the sleaze watchdog and replace it with apparatus controlled by the governing party as “a preemptive strike” by the PM amid the possibility of further inquiries into donations for the redecoration of Downing Street. Cummings’ view was denied by Downing Street, but he tweeted that Johnson had “botched his shot at K Stone” and then urged her to start taking witness evidence about the matter. In April this year, the Labour MP Margaret Hodge reported Johnson to Stone over the initial redecoration costs of his Downing Street flat, but it has not yet been announced whether the commissioner will be looking into the allegations.
Lord Geidt, the adviser on ministerial standards, cleared Johnson of misconduct over the matter in May, but said that he had acted “unwisely” in not finding out how the renovation was funded. An Electoral Commission investigation into the matter is progressing, the regulator said on Thursday. “The initial findings of our investigation have gone to the [Conservative] party, and it now has time to make any representations about those findings,” a spokesperson said. “We will consider any response and make a final decision. We will publish our findings at that point, and will not be making further comment until then.” On Thursday, Lord Evans, chair of the commission for standards in public life, decried the government’s “repeated attempts to question the integrity of the commissioner of standards herself, who is working within the system the House of Commons agreed in 2010”. Chris Bryant MP, chair of parliament’s standards and privileges committee, also said Stone should see out her five-year term which started in 2018.