The Conservative party, dancing to the CBI's tune, has started playing games with the anti-bribery bill, much to the annoyance of Labour ministers and potentially to the detriment of some of the poorest countries in the world.
Last night the Tory frontbench led by Jonathan Djanogly, the bright and personable shadow business minister, started filibustering on the bill in standing committee and potentially endangering it. Tory MPs started reading out great chunks of the briefing papers sent them by the CBI, a body that cannot see the virtue in the bill, such is its blind hatred of regulation.
One Labour MP, the sadly retiring Peter Kilfoyle, invented a new collective noun for these kind of Tory lawyers, dubbing them "a quibble".
But what the Conservative MPs were doing was not just a parliamentary game. This is a Law Commission bill, and it had until recently all-party agreement. It has been through endless parliamentary scrutiny.
It is designed to lift the blight of corruption in Africa by making the rules on honest business practice easier to enforce an clearer.
Labour whips and the minister Michel Wills, another MP sadly retiring from this blighted palace, responded yesterday by making the MPs on the standing committee stay late at night to try to finish it. The Tories at this point backed down, and stopped mucking around.
With the clock ticking fast to the end of this parliament, the temptation is for the Conservatives to use any legislation as a bargaining chip in the coming "wash-up", the moment when the Conservatives can in effect decree which parts of which bills they are willing to allow onto the statute book. This may have just been one of the first skirmishes in this wider battle, but bribery is not good place to start.
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