Boris Johnson is “abusing the ministerial code” by redrafting it to reduce the potential sanctions for ministers who break rules, a former member of the government’s ethical standards watchdog has said, urging Conservative MPs to challenge this. Jane Martin, formerly the local government ombudsman who served on the committee on standards in public life for five years until December 2021, said Johnson had wrongly used a report by her committee as a spur to weaken the code. The prime minister was widely criticised on Friday after announcing a revision to the ministerial code to formally set out that ministers who breached the code would not be automatically expected to resign but could apologise or forfeit some pay instead. In changes made before an inquiry by MPs into illicit lockdown parties inside Downing Street, Johnson blocked his independent ethics chief, Christopher Geidt, from gaining the power to launch his own investigations. He also rewrote the foreword to the code, removing references to honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability. In a letter to the Times, Martin said Johnson had used “shamelessly manipulative tactics” and ignored the committee’s report used as the basis for the code’s rewrite. “Its recommendations were absolutely not designed to water down standards, but intended to develop a balanced approach to accountability with appropriate sanctions – including retaining resignation for the most serious breaches, such as misleading parliament,” she wrote. “This prime minister is abusing the ministerial code, which is (and should be) owned by him. His redrafting demotes the seven principles of public life, indicating a choice to ignore the fundamentals of parliamentary accountability, which he of course understands.
“I conclude that he is avoiding accountability through all conventional channels. Surely Conservative MPs cannot ignore this any longer.” Speaking on Monday morning the junior culture and media minister, Chris Philp, said the decision to update the code had been made a year ago and was unconnected to the inquiry into parties. “All of the rules about the importance of being honest with parliament, and all of those things, are still in there,” he told Sky News. The main change “was the ability to have a graded series of sanctions, so just like in any workplace, if somebody breaks the rules they don’t necessarily get fired straight away, there are other sanctions that fall short of getting fired”, he said. Asked why Johnson’s new foreword to the code no longer included references to the importance of the main principles of ethics in public life, Philp said: “The foreword is a general introduction, and I guess that he just wanted to talk about whatever he wanted to talk about in that foreword. They are all still in the code.”