This week in government has been bad. Why? Because one of the foundations of national and local government has been abused.

Standards in Public Life are meant to be an ethical foundation that supports and guides how all politicians – whether local or national – conduct themselves on behalf of the people who elect them. At Westminster we have just witnessed an appalling abuse of the Standards system by Boris Johnson’s government.

Many people have been dismayed about an attack by a government minister on those whose job it is to oversee the behaviour of Members of Parliament.

This political tragedy has implications for local authorities such as Uttlesford, whose Standards Committee happens to be somewhat dormant. (It hasn’t met formally for 20 months, so I have been urging that it meets soon.)

A short trip through this week:

• Parliament was asked to impose a punishment of exclusion from the House of Commons for 30 days on a Member of Parliament for taking large sums of money and then promoting the donor company within government.
• On Wednesday Boris Johnson and most Conservative Party MPs dropped a bombshell by suspending the vote on the MP and by voting for their own Standards procedures also to be suspended and then rewritten.
• The same day – uproar within and beyond the Conservative Party and across the media (with few exceptions). Opposition parties refused to play ball with the Conservative MPs appointed to the already tainted review committee.
• On Thursday Boris Johnson and the Conservative Government backed down; the review was scrapped and the not so lucky, guilty MP resigned.
• Every day since Thursday (and probably for some time to come) opprobrium was heaped on the Johnson government and especially on the PM.
• On Saturday former Conservative prime minster, Sir John Major, spoke out on Radio 4’s Today programme. He damned the Johnson government. You can listen to the recording of the interview here.

So the rules that a Conservative government legislated on in 2012 for both Parliament and all local authorities no longer suit today’s Johnsonian government. They have discredited the fundamental rules for both themselves and for councils like Uttlesford.

Meanwhile, a government spokesman on BBC Tv News just before 7 p.m. on Saturday said there was no chaos and that all HMG was trying to do was introduce an appeal system for MPs so that they would be able to try to allow themselves to get off scot free after being found guilty of misdemeanours by fellow MPs.

Now that is strange. It was a Conservative government that abolished the Standards Appeal Process for councillors in 2012.

It’s more than a strange (+) world, isn’t it? (+ Please add suggestions of more applicable adjectives in Comments, please.)

By the way, I have written to Mrs Kemi Badenoch, Conservative MP for Saffron Walden and government minister, for an explanation of her own role is this very serious fiasco and ethical tragedy.

[* Quotation “Lies, chaos and cronyism” by a journalist. Quotation “We need to find our moral compass” by Conservative MP Tobias Elwood.]

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