What the commentators said

“Parliament isn’t quite the rowdy boys’ club it was when I started as a lobby reporter in 1997,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Remember how Tony Blair’s newly elected female MPs were greeted in the Commons chamber by Tories “shouting ‘melons!’ and making breast-juggling gestures”? But while such overt sexism may be less evident today, misogynistic attitudes and untoward behaviour remain a significant problem – one that recent reforms have failed adequately to address. Critics complain that the ICGS, set up in the wake of the Pestminster row, is far too “slow and bureaucratic”. Nobody should want summary justice, said Nick Timothy in The Daily Telegraph, but the rules do need to be toughened up. It’s “ridiculous”, for instance, that voters lack the power to recall MPs such as Rob Roberts, who was suspended from the Tory Party for 12 weeks last year after being found guilty of sexually harassing a member of staff, or the formerly Labour, now independent, MP Claudia Webbe, who was given a suspended sentence for threatening a female love rival with an acid attack.

Most MPs are of course neither bullies nor sex pests, said Paul Goodman on Conservative Home. But the combination of lots of ambitious people, absent families, plentiful bars and younger staff will always be a “volatile cocktail”. These sleaze scandals do tend to surface more frequently when parties have been in power a long time, said Anne McElvoy in the London Evening Standard. Administrations can grow “morally stale as well as politically tired”. Once the fray of this week’s local elections is over, the Tories must work with other parties to make “cultural change” in Westminster “more than just another glib pledge”. Changing the ingrained habits of institutions is very hard, said former Tory minister Nicky Morgan in the Financial Times, but the forthcoming restoration of the Palace of Westminster could help bring about that process. “Perhaps everyone spending several years outside the building might finally break the current culture and build a parliamentary workplace fit for the 21st century.”