Owen Paterson MP has resigned after a trumped-up scandal in which he was accused of bringing parliament into disrepute.
No good, in my view, will come of this. Justice has not been served. Westminster will remain as reptilian and corrupt as ever it has been. A decent man, one of the few effective and principled backbench MPs, has lost his seat and will no doubt be replaced by a politically correct time-server more in tune with Boris Johnson’s brand of fake conservatism.
Obviously this is not at all the take you’ll read on left-dominated social media. The usual suspects, led by Labour opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer, have seized the opportunity to imply that this “sleaze” problem is unique to Conservatives:
But, of course, the problem with Britain’s MPs is by no means confined to the Tory benches. Indeed, on the very day of Paterson’s resignation another MP, one elected for Labour this time, was given a ten-week suspended prison sentence for “harassment”. Claudia Webbe MP, it emerged in the case, had made 16 menacing phone calls to a female friend (whom she had never met) of her partner’s, in one of which she threatened her with an acid attack.
Webbe is now claiming that despite the court’s generously lenient sentence she is the victim of racism and is appealing against the decision of what she insists was a “white court”.
Other Labour MPs have, in the last few years, been caught in scandals including fraud, drug dealing, contempt of court, paying rent boys with cocaine, bullying, and misappropriation of funds.
Perhaps, if the parliamentary authorities are determined to clean up Westminster, it’s this sort of thing on which they should be focusing their attention. Westminster really is a cesspit of debauchery, depravity, and corruption, yet its slimy denizens are rarely brought to account. Instead, when the authorities do intervene, they seem to prefer to deploy their sledgehammer to crack the nut of venial slips like Paterson’s alleged lobbying misdemeanours.
Paterson has maintained throughout that he is innocent of the charges laid against him by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Kathryn Stone.
In his poignant resignation letter, Paterson writes:
The last two years have been an indescribable nightmare for my family and me.
My integrity, which I hold very dear, has been repeatedly and publicly questioned. I maintain that I am totally innocent of what I have been accused of and I acted at all times in the interests of public health and safety. I, my family, and those closest to me know the same. I am unable to clear my name under the current system.
Far, far worse than having my honesty questioned was, of course, the suicide of my beloved and wonderful wife, Rose. She was everything to my children and me. We miss her everyday and the world will always be grey, sad and ultimately meaningless without her.
Yes, indeed. You might have thought that the tragic suicide of Paterson’s wife Rose last year might have been the opportunity for the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to call off her attack dogs and go for a more fitting target. But no, she persisted — for reasons that many of Paterson’s allies suspect are political: Stone is a Remainer, an appointee of the egregious John Bercow, with a track record of favouring Labour MPs over Brexiteer Conservative ones. Paterson had to be punished and destroyed, they believe (and I agree) not because he’d done anything particularly egregious but because he didn’t hold the correct Establishment views.
As I argued yesterday, Paterson was the kind of principled maverick the Westminster system loathes:
He was sacked from his cabinet post of Environment Secretary because 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.
He’s also exactly the sort of person we should have representing us in Westminster but increasingly don’t. Instances like this will make it harder than ever for parliament to attract the right sort of candidates: independent-minded folk who won’t simply go along to get along.
But that, of course, was always the object of the exercise.
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