The A list and its successors haven’t kept a golden generation out of Parliament. Many of those who might have made it up aren’t putting themselves forward for selection in the first place.
He claims that Labour’s plans on pensions, energy, and more would mean “endless borrowing and higher prices”.
One can well imagine the public response to any such campaign. We get the political class we deserve.
The committee’s report was thorough, but the sentence is disproportionate.
It indicates that his conduct since stepping down as an MP is why the sanction is so severe – but doesn’t tell us, beyond being sufficient to trigger a recall, what the original would have been.
They recommend a 90-day suspension and that he be refused the parliamentary pass customarily afforded to former MPs.
Our representatives are so bogged down with super-councillor make-work that they don’t have time to focus properly on national issues.
Party activists could be forgiven for wondering if he would now rather have Starmer in Downing Street than Sunak.
“He’s quitting as much on his own terms as he can, given the essentially zero political wriggle-room he had left.”
He defends the Government’s approach to the Covid inquiry, in light of its commitments to “end the abuse of the judicial review”.
A staunchly pro-Brexit Tory peer or an ardently Europhile Labour MP agree that it should be the legislature which sets the law of the land.
The King should seek to build the Commons up rather than consider it an embarrassment.
They have been introduced in response to backbench pressure – with the Government seeming to accept the argument that the Bill as introduced was vulnerable to litigation. Parliament should accept them, but should be aware that some risks remain.
“When our Sentencing Act ended the early release of offenders who pose a danger to the public – it was the Labour Party who voted against it.”
Many of Tory MPs will be sick and tired of the self-reverential obsequies attached to the Committee’s deliberation and verdict – and of the hysteria, hate, vitriol and venom directed at a man without whom many would never have had the opportunity to serve in Parliament.