Standards in Public Life

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Monday 9th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones]

As I said in my statement, on a number of those measures, we are looking at current procedures, and at whether they can be updated to provide more transparency. The hon. Member is right to say that although individual rules can be improved, that alone will not be sufficient to tackle the cultural issues that lead to some of these challenges. It is on us all, cross-party, and any other people in power, to call out such behaviour, and to make it clear that it is not acceptable in public life.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

Further to the point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), this looks like smoke today. The horse has bolted so far that it is at Wetherby racecourse, and the right hon. Gentleman is not giving the answers that we need to hear. He said that this goes to the heart of who the Prime Minister is, so why did the Prime Minister believe that somebody who took loans that, in today’s money, would be worth more than £1 million, and who was found to be flogging passports, should ever be rewarded?

[Darren Jones]

On the first part of the right hon. Gentleman’s question, I would just remind him that the reforms that this Government have made in the past 18 months, and those we are talking about today, will be the most wide-ranging reforms to standards in public life that we have seen for a very long time. I would not call that smoke and mirrors; I would call that progress. On the second part of his question, as I have said repeatedly to the House, if the Prime Minister had known the depth and extent of the relationship between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson would not have been appointed in the first place. [Interruption.] It is easy for Opposition Members, with the benefits of hindsight, and with access to documents that were not available to the Prime Minister at the time of the appointment, to say that things should have been done differently.