A senior Tory Minister has attempted to laugh off the sleaze allegations engulfing Boris Johnson’s government ahead of the issue returning to the Commons on Monday.
Oliver Dowden, the co-chairman of the Conservative Party, defended Boris Johnson’s admission that he “could have handled it better” when asked again about his botched Commons attempt to get rid of sleaze allegations against his old friend Owen Paterson.
The comments by the PM are the closest he has come to apologising for the Tory attempts to overhaul the MPs’ standards watchdog and relieve Tory MP Owen Paterson of his punishment for breaking lobbying rules a few weeks ago.
Dowden defended Johnson to Sky News on Monday morning and said the government acknowledged it had made mistakes.
He said: “The prime minister has said he regrets it, he said mistakes were made. But really the prime minister’s focus is actually on government.”
The Tory Party co-chair continued to push back against similar calls for a Prime Ministerial apology as he spoke to other broadcasters while promising that “the government is not sleaze-ridden”.
MPs will be voting on Monday on whether to remove the amendment to the Standards Committee on Monday afternoon.
Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg faces the prospect of an embarrassing U-turn in asking the MPs to overturn the previous Tory vote on setting up a new standards process and to finally approve the standards committee report which found that Owen Paterson broke rules by not declaring paid lobbying on behalf of private firms.
The government also faces calls for an investigation into claims that UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps spent taxpayers’ money setting up
a team within the Civil Aviation Authority designed to lobby against planning developments that infringe on airstrips
The minister, who has a private pilot’s licence and owns a £100,000 aeroplane, and his department officials said the team was not a lobbying body and provided “support to general aviation on a range of matters affecting their operations”.
Labour has also written to Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone asking her to investigate Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg after weekend reports that he may have broken the rules by failing to declare £6 million of cheap loans from his “Cayman-linked” company.
A slew of sleaze allegations, including Scots Tory leader Douglas Ross referred himself to the parliamentary standards watchdog for failing to declare 16 payments of £7,000 from the SFA for his work as an assistant referee, have left the Tories in a tailspin.
A fourth opinion poll in less than a week put Labour ahead of the Conservatives with Opinium putting Labour on 37 per cent to the Tories on 36 per cent across the UK.
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