It is one of the most egregious acts of government corruption that the UK has seen in years. Tory MPs voted to axe the public standards watchdog after it had the temerity to find their colleague, Owen Paterson, guilty of breaking rules by lobbying for a firm that won hundreds of millions worth of COVID contracts.
Paterson would have received only a 30-day suspension from the Commons for committing the most serious breach of standards, but this mattered little to his colleagues on the government benches. The whole system had to go, they decided, to protect one of their own.
Ironically, transparency campaigners have been calling for wholesale reform of parliamentary standards for years. But now it's being done for all the wrong reasons – and the effect will be chilling.
