Even after falling on his sword, Owen Paterson continues to insist that he’s done absolutely nothing wrong.
The fallen Tory MP’s resignation statement, released at 2.30pm today, was utterly unapologetic.
It maintained that he’s ‘totally innocent’ of sleaze and sought to characterise his lobbying for two companies, which have paid him more than £500,000, as a courageous act of whistleblowing.
‘I acted in all times in the interests of public health and safety,’ it read.
North Shropshire MP Owen Paterson quits after facing the possibility of a 30-day suspension and threat to a by-election within his constituency
Paterson had been saying exactly the same thing on Wednesday night when, amid spiralling public outrage, he hit the airwaves to declare: ‘I would do the whole lot again tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t hesitate.’
By ‘the whole lot’, he’s referring to various meetings he arranged and emails (or letters) he sent between 2016 and 2020 that had helped serve the agenda of his two Northern Irish employers: health giant Randox – which paid him £100,000 a year for consultancy services – and a meat firm called Lynn’s Country Foods, which had him on a retainer of £12,000 a year.
Parliament’s sleaze watchdog explained last month exactly why this work broke strict Commons rules, via a forensic 170-page report.
It was produced by three Tory MPs. All of them unambiguously supported the findings. Yet Paterson and his supporters regard it as a politically-motivated stich-up.
Paterson alleged the ‘living hell’ of the lobbying probe contributed to his wife Rose’s suicide last year, going so far as to argue at one point – via a letter to the committee – that to find him guilty would place the blame for his wife’s death firmly at his door.
This argument seems, perhaps understandably, to have gained a sympathetic hearing from Boris Johnson (a victim of previous sleaze inquiries) who on Wednesday forced MPs to block Paterson’s suspension, on the grounds that he’d somehow been denied ‘natural justice’.
It was, of necessity, a terrible mistake. It was also possible to avoid it.
For had the PM bothered to actually read the report detailing Paterson’s misdemeanours, he’d have quickly realised that this was an open-and-shut case. Or, to put things another way, his backbench chum’s woes were entirely self-inflicted.
Boris Johnson made a dramatic U turn on plans to dismantle the parliamentary standards system and forced Mr Paterson to resign.
The rules clearly forbid MPs from lobbying on behalf of paying clients, or from using their position as a Parliamentarian to confer a ‘financial or material benefit’ upon them.
There is one loophole. It involves ‘exceptional’ and very limited circumstances where they are seeking to highlight ‘a serious wrong or substantial injustice’. The MP is acting as a whistleblower.
Paterson relied on this defence when seeking to justify no fewer than ten approaches he made, on behalf of either Randox or Lynn’s, to the Food Standards Agency between 2016 and 2018, along with four approaches to the Department for International Development on behalf of Randox in 2016 and 2017.
Three of them dealt with the potential danger to public health posed by antibiotics in supermarket milk. To this end, Paterson called the FSA deputy chair to arrange a meeting. The topic had been brought to Paterson’s attention by Randox’s tests.
A meeting was arranged. The subsequent inquiry found that there was nothing in the initial approach.
The MP was only highlighting a concern. In a series emails to FSA officials after the meeting, he began to sound more like a whistleblower and started to resemble a Randox salesman.
One such email saw Paterson wax lyrical about the firm’s ‘superior technology’, declaring that ‘current systems’ for testing milk ‘miss certain illegal products which Randox can detect’.
It added that officials ‘were interested in using the Randox technology within the FSA’ and suggested that the Chief Veterinary Officer ‘liaise with Randox and discuss further how their latest technologies might help on grain and meat’.
Several months later, Paterson called a further meeting ‘because he considered that the FSA had not taken adequate action’.
In a follow-up email he told officials: ‘Several large commercial dairies are extending their use of Randox testing. It would be wonderful if you could have a meeting with VMD [Veterinary Medicines Directorate] to ensure that government agencies do not fall behind.’
This was a clear attempt to not only blow a whistle, but also promote a company paying him as a consultant… which is unambiguously against Commons rules.
Elsewhere, most of Paterson’s seven approaches to the FSA on behalf of Lynn’s involved rules governing the labelling of pork products.
In November 2017, he met with the agency to raise concerns that a rival food producer, Kerry’s, had been selling a range of ‘all-naturally cured’ ham that was said to be chemical-free but in fact contained a potentiallycarcinogenic nitrite derived from celery.
He suggested that the FSA should ban the product. A subsequent email saw him raise the stakes further by asking the FSA to send a formal letter to Lynn’s (to be shared, he requested, with the ‘trade press’).
This could then be forwarded to rival firms such as Kerry’s to ‘warn’ them ‘not to use this form of additive/technology in future’.
Boris Johnson had on Wednesday forced MPs to block Paterson’s suspension, on the grounds that he’d been denied ‘natural justice’
In other words, Paterson was seeking to persuade the FSA to not only remove a potential competitor from the market, but also further his client’s PR agenda. This is a clear violation of Commons rules.
The MP subsequently argued that by flagging the ‘serious harm’ he believed Kerry’s nitrite product could cause to public health, he was seeking to highlight a ‘serious wrong’.
However, he was forbidden to do so in a way that could be of benefit to a client.
Adding to the seriousness of Paterson’s lobbying was the fact that four of the emails he sent to the FSA on behalf of Lynn’s made no mention of the fact that he was a paid consultant to them.
The MP later sought to argue, in his defence, that such a declaration would have been unnecessary because ‘every single person’ at prior meetings had been aware of his status.
He was wrong. Commons rules clearly stipulate that ‘if communications are in writing then the declaration should be in writing too’.
When it came to DfID, Paterson’s lobbying began with a 2016 email to the then secretary of state Priti Patel to set up a meeting between her staff and Randox.
For months, the firm had been trying to arrange such a meeting without success. They were granted the meeting only after Paterson intervened.
He thus conferred a clear advantage upon a paying customer. This is against the rules.
Rory Stewart, a DfID minister who attended the talks in question, said Paterson was ‘not in my view conducting himself in that particular meeting as a paid advocate’.
It was one of 17 witness testimony Paterson provided in his defense.
He complained repeatedly this week that none of the signers of the documents were cross-examined in the Standards Commissioner’s office, arguing that he was denied natural justice.
The truth, however, is that they weren’t cross-examined because all of their testimony was irrelevant to the specific charges Paterson faced.
With regard to Stewart, for example, the MP’s behaviour at the meeting did nothing to alter the fact that he had previously ‘initiated an approach that sought to confer or would have the effect of conferring a benefit on Randox’.
It was the way that you approached the matter, not what happened next, that broke the rules. Other ‘witnesses’, Paterson has claimed, ought to have been interviewed because they will ‘confirm my motivations were genuine’.
Yet his ‘motivation’ has nothing to do with whether he broke lobbying rules.
The actual test is to determine if a minister’s or public official’s approach could benefit a paying customer. The MP’s defence against other charges seems even more threadbare.
He argued his decision to hold 16 meetings with paying clients in his Commons office – against strict rules – was justified because whips ‘had encouraged members to remain on the [Parliamentary] estate’ to take part in votes.
In fact it emerged that on one occasion that he’d cited, the meetings had taken place at 9.30am and 3.15pm when MPs were actually voting at 10pm.
On another day, a meeting took place at 9am when MPs didn’t have to vote until 12.15pm.
Paterson alleged the ‘living hell’ of the lobbying probe contributed to his wife Rose’s suicide last year
The sleaze watchdog found no reason why Paterson couldn’t have met clients at venues near to the Commons, or even held the meetings via telephone.
It also remains unclear why, throughout the period he was lobbying for both Randox and Lynn’s, Paterson made no effort to contact officials to check that he stayed on the correct side of the rules.
He might have taken such a step to avoid falling for sleaze guidelines. He might have paid back six months of his salary to employers before lobbying on their behalf.
The most delicate chapter in the saga, of course, involves his wife Rose’s suicide last June.
Paterson testified at the inquest but there is no evidence that he suggested then that the sleaze probe was a contributing factor to her decision to end her life.
It wasn’t until this January, in a supportive interview with the Daily Telegraph, that the possibility of ‘reports about Mr Paterson’s external consultancy work’ being partly to blame was first raised.
Back then, the MP stressed: ‘We will never definitively know why’ Rose took her life.
Now, fast forward to September. ‘My family and I are in no doubt that the way this investigation has been conducted played a massive role in creating the extreme anxiety which led to her suicide,’ Paterson wrote to the Standards Committee.
He could have saved his political skin by allowing his guilt to be accepted, serving a 30-day suspension and then moving on. It seems unlikely that voters in a seat where his 24,000 majority supported him would have elected to remove him.
Instead, he doubled his efforts, sparking a toxic row which threw the Government into turmoil.
In his resignation letter yesterday, he said the whole thing had placed him in an ‘intolerable’ position.
‘Worst of all was seeing people, including MPs, publicly mock and deride Rose’s death and belittle our pain.’
He did not provide any examples of MPs publicly mocking his wife’s suicide and there is no evidence that such behaviour occurred.
But this explosive claim, like so much about the sorry affair, can only push Parliament’s reputation further into the gutter.