A Conservative MP who entered parliament in 2010 began to receive what he described as a series of “unusually persistent” texts from his Tory whip last week. The member in question had been part of the Conservative intake that followed the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009. The arrival of this new group at Westminster – many of them with impressive previous careers outside politics – was supposed to demonstrate, as David Cameron said at the time, that his party was reforming its ways, ridding itself of sleaze. By Sunday the MP in question says the texts became phone calls and the level of pressure he was being placed under was becoming uncomfortable. In parliament on Monday and Tuesday he was pulled aside, to have his arms twisted in a way he had not experienced before. “I was told this was coming direct from the chief whip. The message was, if you don’t back the government you will be one of very few who will be letting your colleagues and your party down. It was the full treatment.” But it was not the pressure that concerned him so much as the cause he was being asked to support. To his astonishment, the whips were telling him and other backbenchers to back the government in moves aimed at blocking the suspension from parliament of their colleague, the former cabinet minister and Tory old-stager Owen Paterson. “It was all about how appallingly Owen had been treated by the standards commissioner,” he said. “I replied saying, but hang on I need time to look at this. Have we not had a formal procedure that is pretty conclusive here?” He and everyone in parliament, irrespective of party, knew that an official two-year inquiry by the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, had just found Paterson guilty of some of the most “egregious” breaches of parliamentary lobbying rules seen in many years and that parliament’s own standards committee, set up in the aftermath of the expenses scandal, had examined the case and recommended that Paterson be suspended for 30 days.
On a personal level there was plenty of sympathy for Paterson. Last year his wife, Rose, who ran Aintree racecourse, had taken her own life as the investigations into her husband continued. But despite the tragedy it seemed to most MPs that due process had been followed and the evidence against him was pretty conclusive. Paterson had repeatedly lobbied ministers on behalf of two companies – the clinical diagnostics firm Randox and Lynn’s Country Foods – who were together paying him more than a £100,000 a year. His actions breached rules which ban MPs from taking part in paid advocacy. In addition, Paterson had, on 16 occasions, used his House of Commons office for meetings relating to his private business interests, and failed on a number of occasions to declare those interests. So given the list of breaches what, MPs wondered, was going on? By Tuesday there was little doubt who was driving the “save Paterson” effort. It was coming from No 10. Since the weekend, after his old boss at the Daily Telegraph Charles Moore had written a piece saying his pal Paterson had been terribly treated by Stone’s investigation, Boris Johnson had been determined to act. On Tuesday evening Johnson and Moore had dinner at the Garrick Club and the Paterson issue was discussed.
Things were moving at pace. The chief whip, Mark Spencer, and the leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, were already hatching a plan to hold off Paterson’s punishment and reform the parliamentary standards committee, now chaired by Labour MP Chris Bryant, replacing it with a new committee with a Tory chair and majority. There were also vicious briefings taking place against Stone by some senior Tories, who questioned whether she should stay in post given what they alleged had been her failure to give Paterson a fair hearing. A former Conservative minister who had become aware by Tuesday that an operation was under way to overturn the findings of the investigation into Paterson said: “When it became clear what was going on it was one of those moments where you want to encourage the whips’ office to take a step back, take a walk round the block, get some air and a sense of perspective. It was so unethical. I thought do I really want to be associated with these people?” Accusations have also emerged that Tory whips threatened MPs with the loss of local funding unless they fell into line. On Wednesday afternoon the plan was put to a vote of MPs. Johnson ordered his own troops to be put on a three-line whip. The government won by a margin of 250 to 232, but several dozen Tories refused to back the government. The damaging rebellion saw 13 vote against and 60 abstain, including former prime minister Theresa May, having been encouraged to stay away. Chaos ensued. Labour and the other opposition parties quickly said they would have nothing to do with the new committee that they said would inevitably be a Tory-run sham. Without opposition MPs, parliamentary standards would be upheld and investigated by a body on which only Tories would sit. It was unsustainable and everyone except those who masterminded the idea knew it. On Thursday morning the Daily Mail turned on Johnson and his party. “Shameless MPs sink back into sleaze,” it said, declaring it a “dark day for democracy”. The next morning, amid predictable levels of public uproar, Rees-Mogg stood up and announced a complete U-turn, dropping the plan to pause Paterson’s suspension and, it seemed, the idea of setting up a new standards committee. “It was a total farce,” said a former minister. “The stench of sleaze and the mindblowing incompetence could be massively damaging to us.” Paterson heard the news that the plug had been pulled on him after all, despite Johnson’s efforts, while shopping in a supermarket and quickly announced that he would step down as an MP. Conservative backbenchers who had been pressed to vote for the plan against their better judgment and had taken flak for doing so in their constituencies were furious. Senior ministers were also tearing their hair out. “This has gone straight into my top 10 fuck-up chart,” said one. Conservative backbenchers railed at the prime minister and what they said had been a small old guard of ageing hardline Brexiters whose sense of entitlement knew no bounds. “Owen Paterson was from a certain group of MPs from a certain period of time who had a sense of entitlement and large majorities who thought they could browbeat parliament into doing what they wanted,” said a Tory backbencher who voted against the government. “You don’t use an 80 majority in this way. They are out of touch. A lot of us are very pissed off about it. Many of those who abstained now think they should have voted against. It backfired massively.” But if a desire to help a fellow hardline Brexiter who suffered personal tragedy was part of the motivation, and part of what tempted Johnson down such a disastrous path, many MPs believe there may have been other important and arguably darker factors at play. Early on Thursday – after parliament had voted but before Rees-Mogg announced the U-turn – business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng appeared to call into question Kathryn Stone’s suitability to stay on as parliamentary commissioner for standards. Kwarteng told Sky News: “I think it’s difficult to see what the future of the commissioner is, given the fact that we’re reviewing the process, and we’re overturning and trying to reform this whole process, but it’s up to the commissioner to decide her position.”
Labour immediately cried foul again, suspecting an effort to force Stone out. Deputy leader Angela Rayner leader fired off a letter to Christopher Geidt, Johnson’s independent adviser on ministers’ interests, saying: “For the business secretary to use this entirely corrupt process to bully the independent parliamentary commissioner is disgusting. This type of behaviour has no place in our democracy.” She suggested Kwarteng could be in breach of a section of the code which requires ministers to “treat all those with whom they come into contact with consideration and respect” and for working relationships with civil servants, ministerial and parliamentary colleagues and parliamentary staff to be “proper and appropriate”. The suspicion in Labour circles, and some Tory ones, was that Johnson wanted Stone out of the way because she is known to have been considering whether to launch a separate investigation into the refurbishment of the prime minister’s flat, which reportedly cost £200,000 and was initially funded by a Tory donor. Stone has said she will decide whether to launch a separate probe into “wallpapergate” once the Electoral Commission has completed its own investigation into the matter. The commission’s report is understood to have arrived at the headquarters of the Conservative party on Monday. Former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve said on Friday that replacing the entire standards procedures as they exist at present “might be quite convenient because the prime minister himself might be the subject of its scrutiny shortly over his issues of non-declaration”. Just as concerning for Johnson’s government would be investigations – now being demanded by all the main opposition parties – into Paterson’s other lobbying activities, particularly his work on behalf of Randox during the pandemic. While Paterson was still being paid more than £8,000 a month by Randox for 16 hours’ work, the company won more than £500m of Covid-related contracts from the government. Labour is leading calls for all his meetings and contacts with ministers to be made public. The former Northern Ireland secretary forged connections with executives at Randox Laboratories, a global healthcare company based at Crumlin, County Antrim, because of his interest, while he was still in government, in the campaign for a lower corporation tax rate for Northern Ireland. The proposal was unsuccessful, but the veteran MP and the company’s founder, Peter Fitzgerald, struck up a friendship. When Paterson was sacked from the cabinet by David Cameron in July 2014, there was some consolation: a plum consultancy role with Randox that would allow him to use his connections spanning the corporate and medical worlds and politics. Fitzgerald and Paterson shared a love for racing. It was while they were out riding that the MP raised the question of sponsorship of the Grand National. Randox has sponsored the event for the past four years. Paterson’s wife was also on the board of the Jockey Club, which owns Aintree, along with Dido Harding, who became head of the government’s test and trace programme. Matt Hancock, the former health secretary whose West Suffolk constituency includes Newmarket, has been referred to as the MP for horse-racing and has received significant donations from the industry. In March last year when the Covid pandemic was declared, Randox emerged as one of best-placed companies for landing contracts. Hancock had visited its hi-tech new headquarters at the Randox Science Park in Antrim in March 2019 and one of its senior executives had participated in a “war-gaming” exercise in Downing Street shortly before lockdown. On 30 March 2020, Randox was awarded a £133m contract to test for Covid-19. The government said it awarded the contract without being advertised because of the urgency of the situation. The company said Paterson was not involved in winning the contract, but 10 days later Lord Bethell, then a health minister, had a telephone meeting with Randox and Paterson to discuss Covid testing. The government has declined to give further details of this meeting under freedom of information laws. Hancock has singled out Randox for praise. “Randox has played a vital role in building our global-scale diagnostics capacity,” he tweeted in summer 2020. In October last year, the firm was awarded a £346.5m testing contract. Again, the contract was awarded without being advertised.
Jolyon Maugham, a barrister and founder of the Good Law Project, a campaign organisation which is taking legal action over some of the contracts awarded during the pandemic, said: “Randox was given the red-carpet treatment and the government must now provide full disclosure on how the contracts were awarded. “The government has been far too contemptuous for far too long of the public interest in ensuring that public money is spent for public purposes. Every time you try and establish how a contract was awarded you are blocked by this government.” Martin Bell, the former BBC correspondent and independent MP for Tatton from 1997-2001, who beat the Tory MP Neil Hamilton on an anti-sleaze ticket, said the government would pay a “heavy price” over Wednesday’s vote. On Friday there were suggestions from opinion polls and the Tory shires that Bell may be right. In the affluent heart of Rees-Moggs’s Somerset constituency, there were stirrings of discontent among the previously loyal. Next to a handsome parade of honey-coloured stone shops in Chew Magna, Mike Brooks, 75, explained how he was considering – for the first ever – not voting. “It was an enormous error of judgment for Boris Johnson. I think he’s done a lot of damage to the credibility of parliament and the Conservative party,” he said outside the post office. “It was obviously partial. They were changing the rules to suit their friends.” Johnson and Rees-Mogg had gone down in his estimation. “Normally I vote Conservative. But I’m quite likely to withhold my vote,” he said. “I think Johnson is a buffoon. This is just confirmation of what I think of him and his cronies.”
The village’s younger voters were troubled but not completely shocked by the latest scandal to hit the government. Clare Foster, 37, who was taking her son for a hot chocolate at a local cafe, found it all very depressing. “It’s just one thing after another. I find it frustrating and miserable really but I don’t expect anything better,” she says. “They are looking after their own.” After a disastrous and embarrassing week for both the Conservative party and Downing Street, it is views such as these that will worry Tory MPs most, as the allegations of sleaze mount up against Boris Johnson, his friends, and his government.