Vaz not going down without a fight

Keith Vaz has just asked a second question in the House of Commons, despite it being unclear whether he can continue as chair of the Home Affairs Committee for the long term following allegations about his private life in the Sunday newspapers. The Leicester East MP, who has a meeting with his committee tomorrow afternoon, is clearly not going down without a fight: he wouldn’t be standing up in the Commons, otherwise.

When a scandal-hit MP stands up in the Commons in the days after lurid newspaper headlines, they are normally either mocked and heckled by jubilant colleagues on the other side of the house, or welcomed with supportive noises from MPs who think the coverage unfair and intrusive. Vaz got neither: he stood up to silence, broken only by one MP saying ‘yer’, to ask a question about Daesh, and then sat down. Vaz is not particularly popular with MPs, with his kinder critics believing him to be guilty of bandwagon-jumping.