Boris Johnson may fall into the camp of Prime Ministers that no one remembers if he takes takes Parliament for granted, Tobias Ellwood has said.
The former Defence Minister said Mr Johnson risks ending up as “just another former occupant of Number 10 if Parliament's reputation is damaged.
Tory MP Owen Paterson had been given a 30-day suspension by a Parliamentary committee for breaking lobbying rules.
And he quit as an MP just before he could be suspended.
Mr Paterson was paid a whopping £112,000 a year on top of his £82,000 a year MPs salary to lobby ministers and officials on behalf of two private companies.
Mr Ellwood, chair of the Defence Select Committee, said he couldn't find a single Tory MP who joined Parliament in 2015 who thought the idea was "good politics".
“A PM who takes Parliament for granted will achieve none of these things and simply end up, not as a big beast, but as just another former occupant of No 10,” Mr Ellwood wrote in The Sun.
He noted MPs inboxes had been filled with furious constiituents who feel as though it's one rule for MPs and one rule for everyone else.
The senior Tory added: “This mess should be used as an opportunity to press the reset button on the entire Parliament-government relationship, then regroup.
"There is genuine rage within the ranks.
“Constituents have been rightly appalled by what they have seen. One system for MPs, another for the public.”
It comes after former Tory premier Sir John Major blasted the PM for trashing the Parliament’s reputation over the saga.
Sir John said a peerage for Mr Paterson would be “rather extraordinary” as he launched a blistering attack on the “shameful” actions of Mr Johnson’s government, arguing that they were “perhaps politically corrupt.
In a further sign of Tory anger about the handling of the Paterson row, former minister Caroline Nokes – a prominent critic of Mr Johnson – wrote in the Sunday Mirror: “If my postbag is anything to go by, the public think the PM’s decision to circle his wagons and attack Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Stone well and truly stinks.
"And it does.”
Mr Paterson "stepped aside" from his roles advising private firms, hours after he quit as an MP.
The disgraced former minister announced that he was "stepping aside" from his consultancy roles with Randox Laboratories and Lynn's Country foods, which netted him more than £100,000 a year on top of his MPs' salary.
Mr Paterson tweeted: "Thank you to the many people who have sent their kind wishes to me and my family this week.
"At this difficult time, I will be stepping aside from my current consultancy work to focus on my family and suicide prevention."
Mr Paterson was found to have breached lobbying rules in an "egregious" way by the Commons Standards Committee following an investigation by Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Stone.
