The MP for Rhondda on homophobia in the church, family trauma and his own flawed record
Chris Bryant can clearly remember the moment – 3.29pm, 3 November 2021. That was when the Labour MP and chair of the standards committee feared that democracy was done for. The previous week, an investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner, Kathryn Stone, had found that Conservative MP Owen Paterson had committed “an egregious case of paid advocacy” to benefit two companies he was paid to advise, including the health firm Randox. Bryant’s committee recommended Paterson be suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days, and now was the time for the house to vote on it. But prime minister Boris Johnson wasn’t happy with the findings or the recommendation, so the Tories did a very Johnsonian thing. They ripped up the rulebook. Former Conservative minister Andrea Leadsom proposed an amendment to pause Paterson’s suspension and set up a new Tory-led committee to examine how investigations should be carried out in future. Simple. If you don’t like justice, change the judiciary.
“It was really dangerous, what they proposed to do,” Bryant says today. “I still find it shocking that some Tories who I quite respect put their name to the amendment to scrap our committee, create a new one, no lay members on it, and with a Tory majority, chaired by a Tory MP, John Whittingdale. He rang me and said, ‘Well nobody asked me!’” The amendment was passed by 250 votes to 232. It was the first time the Commons had rejected a recommendation from its own disciplinary committee to suspend an MP for misconduct. “A lad said to me in the gym in the Rhondda the other day, when the Boris Johnson report came out from the privileges committee, saying he’d deliberately misled the house over breaches of lockdown rules, ‘If he gets away with this, there’s literally no point in voting ever again.’ And that’s what the Owen Paterson moment felt like for me.” The amendment was followed by an uproar. Paterson resigned the next day and order was briefly restored.
