Chris Pincher should be suspended as an MP for eight weeks following allegations he groped two people at the Carlton Club last summer, Parliament’s standards watchdog has recommended. The Standards Committee report into the Tamworth MP – who was a Tory MP – found that Pincher ‘groped [two people]…and that this was unwanted, inappropriate, and upsetting’.
The lengthy suspension means that Pincher’s constituency can be subject to a recall petition – the threshold needed for these petitions is a suspension of ten days or more – and that a by-election is therefore on the horizon.
Pincher may choose to quit straight away and trigger that election earlier, though a problem is that the candidate for Tamworth is Eddie Hughes, currently the MP for Walsall North. So if Hughes were to stand, he would have to resign his existing seat, which is being broken up in the boundary changes, thereby triggering yet another by-election.
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