One of Boris Johnson's top Cabinet ministers today admitted “we made a mistake” over the sleaze scandal engulfing Parliament.
Nadhim Zahawi also confessed he hasn't even read the 175-page ethics report on Owen Paterson's multiple breaches of lobbying rules.
Yet the Education Secretary voted to block Mr Paterson's 30-day suspension from Parliament anyway on Wednesday.
Blundering Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to rip up ethics rules to save Mr Paterson, but more than 100 refused to do so.
Despite the vote passing, he was then forced to abandon the plans hours later when opposition parties boycotted a body he created to draw up new rules.
Mr Paterson then resigned last night, protesting his innocence claiming he had been dragged through the mud after the suicide of his wife.
A by-election will be held in safe Tory seat North Shropshire. Despite claims there could be a cross-party anti-sleaze candidate, Labour has ruled the move out. A source told the Mirror: "It's not going to happen".
A Lib Dem official confirmed they will not support a cross-party ‘anti-sleaze’ candidate in North Shropshire either.
The official said rules on funding and sharing resources stricter than when Martin Bell stood in 1997, so while it was considered for a “nanosecond” it “hit the rocks”.
Mr Zahawi today repeatedly said "it was a mistake" for the government to back Andrea Leadsom’s amendment, which fused general concerns about the system with overturning Mr Paterson’s suspension.
“We made a mistake by conflating the two things in one”, he said.
Asked who made the mistake, he refused to name Boris Johnson but said there was “collective responsibility” - where Cabinet ministers must not differ from the view of the government, headed by the Prime Minister.
He later admitted to BBC Breakfast: “I actually haven’t read the report, so it would be unfair of me to go into the details”.
Asked why he voted on something without reading it, he replied: "I've looked at the report, I haven't gone into the details.
"Owen says that much of it is contested, In think something like 14 people have said in statements it is contested."
Mr Zahawi repeatedly said the government had "made a mistake" over the scandal.
He told Sky News: "The Prime Minister has always been very clear that paid lobbying is not allowed.
"The mistake is the conflation of creating a fairer system with the right of appeal for Parliamentarians to be able to put forward an appeal process.
"Conflating that with the particular case of Owen Paterson was a mistake and I think the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, came to the House yesterday, upon reflection yes it was a mistake, and I think it was right to come back very quickly to the House and say we need to separate these things out.
"We should work on a cross-party basis to create a fairer system, I think that's a good thing.
"And my appeal to my fellow Parliamentarians from all parties is: let's come together and create a better system with a right of appeal."
Boris Johnson made the catastrophic decision to support Mr Paterson hours after having dinner with pal Charles Moore at a male-only private members' club in London.
Mr Moore, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, has been a vocal supporter of Mr Paterson.
Once Boris Johnson decided to rip up the rules to save his friend, pressure mounted on MPs to back the amendment on Wednesday.
MPs were even told “they would lose funding for their constituency” if they failed to toe the line, one backbencher told the Financial Times.
Labour Party chair Anneliese Dodds said the allegation was “astonishing”, tweeting: “Threatening to hold money back from voters and their communities, all to protect a Tory MP who broke the rules.
“If true this marks a new low for Johnson's scandal-ridden Conservatives.”
Sources told Sky News the Prime Minister decided to U-turn and drop his support after Mr Paterson gave an interview insisting he'd do it all again, because he hadn't broken any rules.
But the claim was not new - Mr Paterson had said “I would not hesitate to act in the same way again" when the report came out last month.
A 175-page report found the MP broke four parts of the MPs’ Code of Conduct after lobbying for two firms that paid him a combined £112k a year.
He made approaches from 2016 to 2018 to the Food Standards Agency about Randox, a testing firm, and meat firm Lynn's Country Foods.
Mr Paterson cited an exemption where MPs can highlight a “serious wrong or substantial injustice”.
He said these included identifying antibiotics in milk, nitrites in bacon and concerns over the calibration of lab equipment.
But the report said this exemption only applied once, and 14 of his other approaches breached rules on “paid advocacy”.
