Ah, the Standards Committee. Where would we be without the parliamentary watchdog? The 14 men and women who sit on this panel have a noble task: policing behaviour within the Commons by overseeing the work of the Parliamentary Commissioner, Kathryn Stone.
Half the committee are lay members, who cannot ever have been members of either chamber; the others are seven MPs drawn from across the House. But unfortunately it seems that some of these MPs have been exhibiting less than exemplary behaviour that you might expect from those in such an exalted position.
Take the committee’s chair, Chris Bryant. He was forced to declare in June that, almost two years late, he realised he should register an overseas visit to Poland. Bryant was subsequently forced to apologise, after being found in ‘breach of paragraph 14 of the Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament.’ In his evidence he declared that ‘I simply cannot explain how the registration slipped my mind in 2019.’ Whoops!
Then there’s Bryant’s senior colleague, Tory Sir Bernard Jenkin. The Harwich MP said last month in evidence to his committee that he listed ‘on the register’ a series of briefing dinners, even though most had not, in fact, been declared at that time. There is also some confusion as to the purpose of the dinners, given he told the committee they were about the nuclear deterrent contrary to reports in the Daily Mirror that they were about the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Both Jenkin and fellow committee member Laura Farris also awkwardly voted to effectively gut their own committee back in November when they tried to get Owen Paterson off the hook. Tory Alberto Costa meanwhile suffered something of a viral humiliation at a recent committee hearing after deciding to ask Private Eye editor Ian Hislop about his decision to accept hospitality from Heineken.
Costa’s decision to let a staff member attend the Euro 2020 semi-final was dubbed ‘not very convincing’ by the satirist, in a clip that has since been viewed almost three million times since. SNP MP Allan Dorans is not exempt either: a member of his staff had to resign in September over ‘threatening phone calls’ to an Ayr painter.
With behaviour like this, Mr S just hopes someone is watching the watchdogs.
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