Two long-serving peers are to be suspended from the House of Lords after a parliamentary watchdog ruled that they had broken lobbying rules.
Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army, and David Evans, Lord Evans of Watford, were filmed breaking the rules in undercover footage recorded by the Guardian.
Lord Dannatt is to be suspended for four months after he was found to have broken the rules, having offered to secure meetings with ministers for a potential commercial client who wanted to lobby the government.
He was secretly filmed telling undercover reporters he could make introductions to ministers and that he would “make a point of getting to know” the best-placed politician.
After he was exposed in the undercover footage, the Guardian uncovered three further cases in which he had provided parliamentary services in return for payment.
In a separate case, Lord Evans is to be suspended for five months after a finding that his actions “could erode public trust in parliamentarians”, with the watchdog finding four separate breaches of the rules.
The Labour peer was caught offering to introduce undercover reporters – who were posing as property developers hoping to lobby the government – to fellow parliamentarians.
Evans, a peer since 1998, has had the Labour whip removed. Dannatt remains a crossbench peer.
The inquiries into the two peers by the Lords commissioners for standards followed investigations by the Guardian as part of the Lords debate project. They are the latest to be punished. Previously two lords were given sanctions after official inquiries into peers’ conduct prompted by Guardian reporting.
Both Dannatt and Evans initially claimed they had not broken the rules.
But now, in a statement, Dannatt has said: “I deeply regret the commissioner’s findings regarding my personal honour and I decided that the honourable course of action was not to waste the conduct committee’s time by appealing against the findings but to accept the appropriate sanction.”
He added: “I also understand that acting in the national interest in good faith, which was my motivation … is not an excuse or justification for breaching the code of conduct. At nearly 75 no one is too old to learn lessons and I hope that these activities will be placed in the context of my 56 years’ public service.”
Evans did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Improper interactions’
Since retiring from the army, Dannatt has had a portfolio career, with a number of outside interests in addition to his seat in the Lords. He has insisted these roles were in the national interest, and told the watchdog: “I think as far as I’m concerned my personal honour and the national interest are very much one and the same.”
But the report found he had failed to act on his personal honour. Instead, he has repeatedly exploited his status as a parliamentarian to lobby the British government on behalf of commercial interests in what the Lords conduct committee described as “improper interactions with ministers or officials” over a period of two years:
In June 2022, Dannatt lobbied ministers and officials to provide millions of pounds in financial support for a venture looking to purchase a fertiliser factory. Three days after the meeting with a minister, he was paid £2,000, followed by a further three payments of £2,000 months later.
In January 2023 and September 2024, at the instigation of executives at Teledyne, a US defence company that paid him, Dannatt wrote to Home Office ministers to lobby them for “assurances” the government was taking action against Palestine Action. The letters followed an attack by the group on the company’s factory.
In January 2024, Dannatt wrote to the UK’s top diplomat in Ghana to organise a meeting with her that he attended with the director of a British goldmine company. They used that meeting to lobby her to get support from the Ghanaian government for the company, in which Dannatt had shares.
Dannatt, a peer since 2011, said that he believed he was acting in the national interest, that he planned to donate his shares in the goldmine company to a charity and expressed remorse that “my misunderstanding of the code of conduct and the publication by the Guardian of highly unwelcome articles has damaged my reputation but more significantly risked that of the House of Lords”.
Dannatt also claimed he had not offered to lobby on behalf of the undercover reporters. He told the watchdog: “In my opinion I was not expressing a clear willingness but a theoretical willingness and that I was talking in the future conditional tense using the words ‘could’, ‘would’ and ‘might’.”
‘Our mates who now have senior jobs’
Evans used his position in the second chamber to get fellow peers to speak at commercial events that his son was holding in parliament. Evans was a shareholder in his son’s company, to which he had also loaned more than £50,000, although he claimed not to remember he had the shares.
Evans told undercover reporters, who had expressed an interest in a £25,000 event sponsorship opportunity offered by his son, that he could introduce them to members of the house. He bragged to them how it was “great being a Labour peer at the moment because we’ve got our mates who now have senior jobs”.
The parliamentary watchdog’s investigation revealed that the Lords authorities had warned Evans’s son Richard Evans last year that he was breaking the rules.
The Lords events team had written to Richard Evans saying that he was charging people more than £400 to attend events and advertising the events without the team’s permission. The rules stipulate that charges for guests must be broadly equivalent to the cost of events held in the Lords and that events cannot be advertised without parliamentary consent.
Despite this warning, the events promoted by Richard Evans continued. Later in the year, the Guardian recorded him and his father breaking the rules.
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