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A Tory grandee faces the threat of the sack for trying to get Owen Paterson off the hook for breaking lobbying rules.
Bernard Jenkin is under pressure from fellow senior Conservatives to resign as paid chairman of the Commons liaison committee.
He is accused of being a ‘stooge’ for Boris Johnson, who ordered the botched attempt to save Mr Paterson.
Bernard Jenkin is under pressure from fellow senior Conservatives to resign as paid chairman of the Commons liaison committee
Sir Bernard’s Tory foes claim he ‘betrayed his duty’ to protect all Commons committees, including the standards committee, which proposed that the former minister should be suspended from parliament for 30 days.
The move to fire Sir Bernard, the MP for Harwich and North Essex, emerged after his wife, Baroness Jenkin, became embroiled in the Paterson scandal.
It emerged yesterday that she exchanged emails with Mr Paterson’s wife, Rose, hours before her suicide last year. Mrs Paterson reportedly wrote: ‘Sometimes I just feel like I should go into the garden and never come back.’
Baroness Jenkin’s email referred to an obscure blog linking Mrs Paterson to Randox, the company at the centre of her husband’s lobbying controversy.
Mr Paterson is understood to have said he believed the email ‘pushed Rose over the edge’. The revolt against Sir Bernard comes from the chairmen of 35 Commons committees, who make up the membership of the liaison committee, which in turn oversees the rest.
He is paid £15,000 a year on top of his £81,000 MP’s salary to run the group.
