HR department to rein in sleazy MPs

■ Speaker plans staffing shake-up to tackle Pestminster scandal ■ Politicians plead: Just don’t shut our House of Commons bars

MPs could be banned from employing staff and Parliament could get an HR department following a fresh wave of ‘Pestminster’ claims.

Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has called for ‘radical’ reform to working practices to counter allegations of drunken behaviour and sexual misconduct.

Claims have emerged that a minister had ‘noisy sex’ in his office, a senior MP ‘licked the faces’ of junior staff and drunken researchers vomited on a parliamentary bar.

Sir Lindsay’s move follows Tory MP Neil Parish’s resignation after admitting watching pornography in the Commons.

Tory co-chairman Oliver Dowden is also taking action by promising half of the party’s candidates at the next election will be women. The figure was one in four at the 2019 election – compared with more than half for Labour.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries last week suggested ensuring ‘a majority of

‘Bullying and impropriety’

women’ in Parliament could help tackle Westminster sleaze.

Among the allegations are claims that a senior Tory MP pestered a female staff member for ‘sexual favours’, according to the Mail on Sunday.

There were also suggestions that another MP offered a member of his staff a taxpayer-funded pay rise but only on condition that part of the increase came to him.

In recent weeks, an MP is said to have become so drunk on champagne that the person had been escorted from the Pugin tea room, according to The Sunday Times.

A female researcher is also said to have consumed so much alcohol that she vomited over a parliamentary bar. She was later found unconscious outside the room.

Other claims include that an MP was warned over his use of prostitutes, while a male Tory MP is said to have sent a picture of his anatomy to a female colleague.

Staffers are also said to have been groped in parliamentary bars by MPs and female parliamentarians subjected to misogynistic nicknames.

But a minister yesterday branded plans to close parliamentary bars as ‘excessively puritanical’.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Times Radio: ‘This idea that we are going to go into some sort of US prohibition-style lockdown in the House of Commons where there are no bars, I think that is huge overreaction.’

He also denied that there was widespread misogyny at Westminster. ‘The problem we have is people are working in a really intense environment, there are long hours and I think generally most people know their limits,’ he added.

He told the BBC’s Sunday Morning show that Parliament was a safe place for women to work, adding: ‘We’ve got to distinguish between some bad apples, people who behave badly, and the general environment.’

Concerns over the culture in Westminster extend to No10, where an award for ‘sexist of the year’ is said to have been handed out at the now infamous Christmas party in 2020.

Elsewhere, a married Tory MP was accused of stating while out campaigning in a recent by-election: ‘Who needs Tinder when you have got canvassing?’

Cabinet minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan last week described being ‘pinned up against a wall’ by a former MP, while colleague Suella Braverman said some MPs acted like ‘animals’. Sir Lindsay said yesterday that he would appoint a ‘Speaker’s conference’ which would be made up of MPs and take advice and consider whether there was a case for change.

‘I take recent allegations of bullying and sexual impropriety very seriously, which is why it is time we reviewed our working practices, particularly whether it is right that individual MPs are the employers of their staff,’ he said.

This would be resisted by many MPs who insist they must know their staff are loyal to them above all – not to an outside employer.

But Sir Lindsay was backed by former Commons leader Andrea Leadsom, who created the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme (ICGS).

‘Things haven’t changed and that’s because there aren’t enough cases coming through and it’s taking too long for investigations to come to an end,’ she said.

‘It’s only when you see people getting done for being blind drunk and subject to the appropriate sanctions that people will start to think twice about their behaviour.’ The ‘Pestminster’ scandal, which first broke in 2017, was revived last week following reports that three members of the Cabinet and two of the Shadow Cabinet face sexual misconduct claims.

The five were said to be among 56 MPs – and 70 complaints – referred to the ICGS, which was set up in 2018.

It has refused to ‘confirm or deny any current investigations’, though its director Jo Willows wrote privately to MPs suggesting the number was more like 15.

Meanwhile senior Labour MP Liam Byrne is set to be suspended from the Commons for two days for bullying a member of staff, for which he has now apologised.

David Warburton had the Conservative whip withdrawn after allegations of sexual harassment and cocaine use emerged. He denies any wrongdoing.

And former Tory Imran Ahmad Khan is resigning after being convicted of sexually assaulting a 15year-old boy.

When pressed in a TV interview yesterday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer did not suggest any solutions to the issue, but said he would participate in the Speaker’s conference.

‘Licked the faces of junior staff’