After months of purges, there is no one left in the cabinet who is willing to hold the prime minister to account
No one doubted it, not even Boris Johnson. The attempt to rescue his friend Owen Paterson from a mild penalty for a breach of the parliamentary code was an abject failure.
The Tories’ short-lived attempt to tear up the independent system for combating parliamentary sleaze has been scrapped. After the government’s U-turn, MPs were due a fresh vote over whether to suspend Paterson from the Commons, but he has now resigned from the “cruel world of politics”. The real worry is that the prime minister clearly had no clue what was wrong. He seemed not to get the point of ethics. Nor presumably to see that his volte face has now led to Paterson’s previously unnecessary resignation. Johnson has now had two years of constant brushes with Westminster’s ethics police – on holiday gifts, expenses, flat decoration and Priti Patel’s bullying – but in each case he just shrugs. He says, in effect, my will is the law.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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