Vaz ‘has got to quit’
No confidence vote looms if disgraced MP tries to cling on to his job
POLITICAL support was haemorrhaging from Keith Vaz last night as pressure mounted on him to quit as chairman of one of Parliament’s most powerful committees. Members of the Commons home affairs select committee were considering an unprecedented vote of no confidence in the senior Labour MP after he was caught allegedly paying rent boys for sex and offering to buy drugs.
Prime Minister Theresa May also effectively suggested the ex-minister should resign when she insisted that people wanted ‘confidence in their politicians’.
Mr Vaz, who has survived a string of political controversies, will face calls to quit at a high-noon meeting with the powerful crossparty committee today, before it questions immigration minister Robert Goodwill.
One senior member of the panel said: ‘I suspect he [Mr Vaz] thinks he can bluff it out and step aside for a few weeks or months or however long it takes to blow over. I think that is hugely optimistic and members of the committee will suggest otherwise.
‘If he thinks he can chair some of the session, everyone will think that is completely untenable. It would overshadow everything we are doing.
‘He has been like a cat with nine lives but this is of a different order.’
Sources have told the Daily Mail that it would be ‘ absolutely impossible’ for the former minister to continue in a role that monitors crime, migration, sexual exploitation and drugs policy.
MPs on the committee will express their views on his position to Mr Vaz then ‘give him time to reflect’.
If he refuses to step down, the other ten members of the committee could ‘go nuclear’ and trigger a no confidence motion in an attempt to force him out, one MP warned. Given Parliament elects select committee chairmen, this is not binding – but it would be hugely symbolic.
It is feared Mr Vaz – one of Westminster’s most unabashed political survivors – will try to ‘bluff it out’ in a bid to cling on to power.
He has faced a series of controversies during his career, but managed to cling on to his seat.
He was one of a handful of MPs to publicly defend Greville Janner against allegations of sex abuse, and in 2009 he was criticised over expenses spent on his Westminster flat when his family home was just 12 miles away.
He has also been investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards, though the inquiry ran into a wall when Mr Vaz – who denied wrongdoing – refused to co-operate, and most complaints were not upheld.
And in 2012 Scotland Yard revealed that funds believed to have been ‘of a suspicious nature’ were paid into accounts either in Mr Vaz’s name or linked to him. He denied wrongdoing and said any money passing through his accounts was the proceeds of property deals.
Yesterday Mr Vaz was clearly trying to give the impression that, far from losing his grip as committee chairman, it was business as usual.
He brazenly returned to work in the Commons little more than a day after becoming embroiled in the sex and drugs scandal, appearing in the chamber to ask Home Secretary Amber Rudd a question about terrorism.
His question about the case of Siddhartha Dhar, a terror suspect who fled Britain to fight with Islamic State in Syria while on police bail, was greeted with a stony silence. He later spoke in a debate about the war in Yemen. Labour MP Chuka Umunna, a committee member, said members would ‘collectively come to a view’ on Mr Vaz’s position.