Chris Bryant is so fed up being lobbied by MPs on behalf of their colleagues that he’s decided to report the next one who sidles up for a quiet word – straight to the parliamentary commissioner for standards.
Bryant, whose cross-party committee polices MPs’ conduct, describes an increase in attempts to influence due process in recent months, culminating in Boris Johnson’s extraordinary botched attempt to overturn the verdict against Owen Paterson.
“It’s: ‘Chris. Can I just bend your ear …?’ Absolutely not!” he says. “It has happened quite a lot over the last year, most notably over the Owen Paterson case but also a couple of others. And in the past, my view has been: ‘Right, I’m just going to tell you you’re not allowed to lobby.’ My new version is: the moment anybody lobbies me I will simply report it to the commissioner and then the commissioner can decide what to do with it.”
The commissioner, Kathryn Stone, investigates MPs’ conduct. But it is Bryant’s committee which then decides what sanctions they should face, with MPs given the final say – though this is usually a formality.
Since Johnson’s bid to clear Paterson opened the way to a maelstrom of allegations about MPs’ financial interests, Bryant has found himself cast as the scourge of the government.
The Labour MP’s coruscating speech in the Paterson debate was heard in a silence rare for the House of Commons, as he warned that if MPs followed Johnson’s lead, Paterson’s name would become a byword for wrongdoing.
Speaking to the Guardian from his Welsh constituency of Rhondda this week, he warned that MPs may now have to endure months of intense scrutiny. “My guess is that there’ll be stories all the way through to Christmas,” he says. “And this angers me, because the government has led us all into this quagmire.”
Bryant first came across Johnson at Oxford University in the 1980s when Johnson was president of the debating club the Oxford Union. “We were at university together. He’s a bit younger than me,” says Bryant, 59.
He only recalls coming across the mop-headed future prime minister on a couple of occasions but says his character was already clear. “You know, he was then almost exactly as he is now.”
Asked if he means Johnson took a relaxed attitude to rules, Bryant bristles. “I don’t think he’s relaxed at all. It’s quite the opposite of relaxed. I think he thinks he’s Samson. He wants to pull the temple down on top of his head. And what is irritating I think, particularly for lots of Tories, in particular new Tories, is that they had no idea what deluge would come. And if you pull the building down on top of you, people tend to get hurt. Completely capriciously.”
The biblical comparison perhaps comes naturally because Bryant was a vicar before becoming a politician. Despite his theological roots, he insists he never intended to set himself up as parliament’s moral guardian, however.
“I do not think of myself as a saint. So I hate the idea of some kind of great witchfinder who’s out there to snatch people into the back of my van,” he says. “I have as many clay feet as anybody else and I’m not a judgmental person by nature.”
Nevertheless, in his 20-year parliamentary career, he has often strayed into what he calls “warm water” – setting himself against foes including the Kremlin and the Murdoch press. More recently, he graphically detailed his successful treatment for skin cancer.
Bryant rejects the word “sleaze”, seeing it as an unhelpful catch-all. “I don’t like the word sleaze because it’s so untargeted. You know, 20 years ago sleaze included just being gay.” Bryant’s civil partnership with Jared Cranney was the first same-sex relationship celebrated at the House of Commons, in 2010.
Rather than sleaze, Bryant believes it is conflicts of interest that damage the standing of parliament. “If people think that you are really not interested in serving the public and you’re really only interested in serving some kind of commercial gain, then I think they look on that very ill,” he says.
“And also then when it accumulates then people start to go: ‘Hang on, it didn’t pass the sniff test last week. Now there’s a really sulphurous smell about the place.’” He says the “vast majority” of MPs have no conflict of interest but all are damaged by the perception that politicians are on the take.
The prime minister felt the need to insist this week that the UK is “not remotely a corrupt country”. Bryant is less complacent. “There are clearly the first spots of corruption on the windscreen but, more importantly, the danger is we are corrupting,” he says, pointing not only to the Paterson case but to the government’s habit of doling out pots of money to handpicked constituencies. “I don’t like the levelling-up fund because basically it’s ministers deciding where to award money, I think that will inevitably lead to corrupting – and every step that you take down that yellow brick road gets you further away from probity.”
Several ministers, including the chancellor Rishi Sunak, have acknowledged the government mishandled the Paterson affair – but Johnson has declined to apologise.
With a motion reinstating the verdict against Paterson coming before the Commons on Monday and expected to pass without a vote, Bryant says he would like ministers to set the record straight by endorsing his committee’s report. “I’ve not heard a single government minister say that Owen Paterson was guilty, and that the sanction was suitable,” he says.
With his committee expected to report within weeks on its review into MPs’ code of conduct, Bryant is happily immersed in the detail of parliamentary rules. But he says that if Keir Starmer asked him to serve in the shadow cabinet, he would do so. “If anybody wants to offer me anything, I would, because in the end I want to change the world and the best way to change the world is through the Labour party. It’s the only real engine of change we have – and that requires every shoulder to the wheel.”
