In the aftermath of the Owen Paterson lobbying scandal, new plans have been published to ban MPs from working as political consultants.
But how far will the changes go towards cleaning up politics? The answer is depressingly predictable.
It is unlikely that the new rules would have stopped Paterson – a former Tory MP who resigned in the wake of the scandal – from doing his lucrative second job. The ban covers a vague spectrum of ‘parliamentary’ consulting, which seems to relate only to lobbying Parliament itself. But this is not what Paterson did.
