If you want to understand why Britain’s backbench MPs have been so thoroughly useless at holding the government to account, look no further than the appalling case of Owen Paterson.
Today Paterson faces being publicly humiliated and having his career destroyed by the Westminster parliamentary authorities for the crimes of being a known Brexiteer and a staunch opponent of the green agenda.
Obviously, this is not the official reason being given for his threatened punishment (a 30-day ban which could result in his losing his seat) recommended by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.
Officially, Paterson is being punished because he brought parliament into disrepute by lobbying on behalf of two companies which together pay him over £100,000 a year.
Paterson’s defence is that when he mentioned these companies’ names in the course of parliamentary questions he was not lobbying but raising vital points of public interest.
“What happened to me is wicked and shameful,” he said in an interview with Nigel Farage on GB News. And when you learn the details, you may be inclined to agree. What makes his story especially poignant is that the trauma of the investigation was partly responsible for the suicide last year of his beloved wife Rose.
His defence appears reasonable and tenable. One of the companies which pays him a retainer, Randox, is a clinical diagnostics company and had spotted the presence of dangerous carcinogens in milk and ham products. Clearly this was a matter of public interest which more than justified Paterson’s parliamentary question.
Many MPs have risen to Paterson’s defence, most of them fellow Brexiteers. They suspect that the hounding of Paterson owes more to the parliamentary authorities’ left-wing, Europhile, green bias than it does to any malfeasance by Paterson.
Former Brexit Secretary David Davis, for example, has his suspicions about the bias of investigating Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone:
Stranger still, the Commissioner, Kathryn Stone, admitted to the clerk of the Standards Committee that she had made up her mind about the substance of the case before sending him that memorandum. She even admitted ‘the dispute is one of interpretation’ – not one of fact.
A flimsy process, you might think, when Mr Paterson’s reputation and the rest of his career are at stake.
Surely an impartial investigator would check every aspect of the case, particularly where questions of interpretation are involved. Yet Ms Stone failed to interview any of the witnesses that Mr Paterson put forward, including the Chief Veterinary Officer and various heads of Government departments. They even included the then International Development Minister, Rory Stewart, who Mr Paterson is supposed to have lobbied. Mr Stewart, a staunch Remainer, is no ally of Brexiteer Mr Paterson.
I suspect that Davis is right. Paterson is not one of those Westminster stooges who does what he is told. That’s why he lost his job as Environment Secretary: he was too critical of EU legislation, too interested in the rights of farmers and other rural folk, too keen on nature and practical solutions — and not nearly dutiful enough in pushing the EU’s green agenda.
Paterson has stood up for the rights of British fishermen, for the rights of farmers to be able to cull the badgers which give their dairy herds tuberculosis and which wipe out hedgehog populations, and for the rights of Brexiteers who, in the teeth of opposition from the Westminster elite and the Deep State, wanted to leave the European Union.
He is exactly the sort of MP that the Westminister machine could do without. No wonder he is being punished with this witch hunt investigation: even if MPs vote today not to give him his 30-day suspension, the message to other backbenchers will be clear. Don’t rock the boat.