No. 10 U-turns on Paterson sleaze row

Less than 24 hours after Tory MPs were ordered to vote to spare Owen Paterson, the government has U-turned. The former minister had been given a one month suspension from the House of Commons by the standards committee over a breach of lobbying rules. No. 10 tried to block his suspension, instead setting up a new committee to overhaul the current disciplinary system. 

Speaking in the Commons chamber this morning, Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg said that the government had abandoned the plans, which proposed a committee weighted in favour of Tory MPs. Rees-Mogg said that he accepted there is a ‘strong feeling’ over recent events and said that any reforms to the standards protocol needed to be separated from the case of Paterson — conceding that Wednesday’s vote had ‘conflated’ the two: ‘Therefore I and others will be looking at working on a cross-party basis to achieve improvements in our system for future cases.’

It comes after deep unrest in the Tory party over Downing Street’s decision to issue a three-line whip to back Paterson and install a new standards procedure decided by MPs.