Reform of lobbying rules long overdue

FINALLY, when he couldn’t resist any longer, Boris Johnson has accepted the need to ban MPs from working as paid consultants or lobbyists for businesses and interest groups.

He won’t have enjoyed coming round to this position, realising it will seriously upset many of his own MPs, both backbenchers and ministers.

Ministers are already banned from acting as lobbyists, although many will have an eye on how to make up the enhanced element of their salary if they lose their ministerial post.

Many ordinary people will wonder why MPs were ever allowed to have outside interests that could impinge on their Parliamentary work.

The answer lies in history, when MPs were unpaid or then so badly paid that they needed another means of income.

Today, though, with a basic salary of around £80,000, it’s much more difficult to justify additional jobs.

The suggested reform has the right focus: having an outright ban on any outside work would be unwieldy.

Why should MPs not write newspaper articles or do shifts in a GP surgery if that is their professional background?

But a lot of nonsense has been spoken and written by those who seek to defend the indefensible.

The argument has been made that by forging links with businesses, MPs are able to keep in touch with the “real world”.

In reality, consorting with even more highly paid corporate executives is likely to alienate politicians even further from the real world as experienced by most of their constituents.

Another element of the reform proposed by Mr Johnson is that MPs could face sanction if they neglect their constituencies in order to devote more time to their outside interests.

It will be interesting to see how this works in practice.

Hitherto there has been no formal attempt to assess the performance of individual MPs by the Parliamentary authorities, with the politicians being given complete discretion about how they use their time. Within living memory, there were MPs who had no home in or near their constituency, and who rarely visited it.

This was a wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs and it’s good that it’s now almost unheard of.

Devising objective means to measure MPs’ contributions will not be easy, however.