Boris Johnson has admitted it was “a total mistake” to try to defend Owen Paterson for breaking lobbying rules in a move that triggered a fortnight of Tory sleaze scandals.
In a beseiged appearance in front of senior MPs Johnson said he accepted that his former Conservative colleague who made £100,000 out of undeclared lobbying had been wrong.
Johnson told the Commons Liaison Committee: “I think it was a very sad case but I think there’s no question that he had fallen foul of the rules on paid advocacy as far as I could see from the report.
“The question that people wanted to establish was whether or not given the particularly tragic circumstances he had a fair right to appeal.”
Paterson, who resigned as an MP, complained that he had not had a fair hearing and that the investigation contributed to the suicide of his wife.
Chris Bryant MP, the chair of the Standards committee, which approved the investigation into Paterson, told the Prime Minister that Paterson’s appeal was heard “endlessly”.
Johnson said: “In forming the impression that the former member for North Shropshire had not had a fair process I may well have been mistaken.”
Johnson said his attempt to replace the disciplinary system for MPs with a new, Tory-majority committee, in a Commons vote had happened after unnamed “colleagues” told him it would have cross-party support.
He said: “I believed that there would be cross-party support for the idea.”
“It was put to me by colleagues that people would feel… and indeed I was fortified in this by the reflection that many people would have felt this was a particularly difficult and sad case.
“I’m very willing to accept I was mistaken in that belief.”
He added: “The intention genuinely was not to exonerate anybody, the intention was to see whether there was some way in which, on a cross-party basis, we could improve the system.
“In retrospect it was obviously, obviously mistaken to think we could conflate the two things and do I regret that decision? Yes I certainly do.”
The grilling was part of a miserable day of cross-examination on sleaze for the Prime Minister who had earlier been branded a “coward” by Keir Starmer for his conduct
He was later due to face angry Tory backbenchers who could lose second jobs outside parliament as a result of Johnson accepting there must be reforms to Commons rules on political consultancies.
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