House of Commons standards commissioner Kathryn Stone is also known as Thomas Becket. At least, she is to Boris Johnson. Like Henry II wishing to be rid of that turbulent priest, the prime minister used the affair of the now ex-MP Owen Paterson in a bid to silence Stone. The difference is that Henry succeeded but Boris failed, and therein may lie his ultimate undoing.
For it is now pretty clear that Stone was the real target. Paterson is a long-standing ally of Johnson and his public school and Brexit gang, including fellow Eton alumnus and business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, who, the morning after the narrow vote to overturn the penalties on Paterson for selling influence in parliament for an obscene £100,000 a year, made a point of telling a TV interviewer that Stone should now resign as she had clearly lost the confidence of... well, Kwarteng and his boss Johnson.
The reason Johnson wants Stone silenced is also fairly transparent. If she could topple Paterson so spectacularly, she presents a risk to many others, particularly a string of pro-Brexit Tory MPs who have been “taking back control” of the proprietary rules in parliament and have standards inquiries hanging over them. Prime among them is the prime minister himself who, with his massively entitled ego, has been gilding his Downing Street flat and taking expensive foreign holidays from donors of increasing interest to the standards commissioner.
It is a mistake to think that because of the Paterson affair Johnson is immediately on the skids. What happened was classic Boris—as described in my Prospect profile of “the Prime Etonian”—in both the speed and ruthlessness of his lunge against the standards commissioner, then his retreat in less than a day when he judged he couldn’t hold the ground.
Johnson’s problem was that with a majority already reduced to 18 on the motion to overturn the penalties against Paterson, and Labour pledging to boycott any new and weaker parliamentary standards regime, too many Tory MPs—particularly among the newly-elected and still-untainted 2019 intake from the northern red wall—simply weren’t prepared to go along with the subsequent acts of parliamentary controversy necessary to abolish the whole system for upholding standards. This now elaborate machinery dates back to the cash-for-questions and allowances scandals at the tail end of the last long period of Tory rule in the 1990s, and the equally sordid finale of the New Labour era before 2010.
After Johnson’s rapid retreat, I would expect the standards issue to fade for a while. His bigger immediate challenge is that all three of his slogans for government—“Make Brexit Work,” “Build Back Better” and “Levelling Up”—are either coming unstuck, or devoid of content.
Brexit minister David Frost himself now concedes the unworkability of his own Brexit deal of only two years ago. Hence his feverish attempts to rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol, which is enraging the province’s Unionist leaders because Brexit is steadily undermining unionism and strengthening Sinn Féin. I attended Sinn Féin’s annual conference in Dublin last week to get the measure for Prospect of that increasingly significant Irish political party, which could soon be leading governments in Northern Ireland and the Republic. I can report that the suavely plausible Mary Lou McDonald and her party are highly organised and confident in their ability to win through the ballot box what they never achieved by the violence of their erstwhile paramilitary allies in the era of the Troubles. The hapless DUP leaders in Belfast who foolishly went along with Johnson and Frost’s hard Brexit game now resemble beached whales.
As for “levelling up,” Johnson devoted a rare day-long seminar at Chequers this week in quest of this holy grail. The trouble is, it doesn’t exist without massive public investment in the midlands and the north to provide infrastructure and services to match those of London and the southeast. Rishi Sunak’s Treasury, carrying record debt and having to pay for Boris’s new NHS and social care plans, isn’t coughing up. Anyway, the equally big problem in the red wall is the lack of highly paid jobs and attractive opportunities for young people, and Brexit is steadily making that worse.
The irony of the week is that the supreme exemplar of levelling up in the red wall is... one Kathryn Stone. Born in Derby and raised in Belper, she attended Belper High School, where, she told an interviewer,“There was an expectation of community participation and demonstration of social responsibility which instilled in me a very strong sense of duty to society and helping those who are disadvantaged.”
Stone’s career began with a job as a houseparent for children with special needs. She later became a child protection social worker and mental health practitioner which led her into regulatory roles as a care services inspector, and then to her current role as parliamentary standards commissioner.
Indeed, her story is more poignant still. A decade ago, she served as Commissioner for the Victims and Survivors in Northern Ireland. At the end of her term, Stormont DUP First Minister Peter Robinson and Sinn Féin’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness paid tribute to her as “tireless in her efforts to ensure people, families and groups were afforded a quality service, in acknowledging the legacy of the past and in building a better future.” She is now equally tireless in pursuit of wrongdoing among MPs.
If a nemesis exists for Boris Johnson, her name may be Kathryn Stone.
