Tory MPs appeared en masse in the House of Commons chamber on Monday, on the eve of summer recess, to heap praise on their embattled chief whip Julian Smith over a Brexit voting scandal.
Backbencher after backbencher paid tribute to Smith as a man of “integrity” and “honour” after he claimed that it was a “mistake” when a pairing deal with a Lib Dem MP on maternity leave was not honoured in last week’s knife-edge Brexit votes.
Under the pairing system, whips match up MPs of opposing sides who then do not vote, to effectively cancel each other out.
The “error” meant that Tory chair Brandon Lewis took part in two crunch votes despite being paired with Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson, who is at home with a tiny baby.
Lib Dem chief whip Alistair Carmichael summoned the government to the chamber to answer an urgent question on what exactly had happened, saying: “It may have been a mistake to cancel the pair, but it was not an inadvertence — it was a deliberate act.”
Tory sources admitted on Thursday that Smith had sent out orders to some MPs to break pairing arrangements — but said these instructions were not meant for MPs who were partnered with those on maternity leave.
But Cabinet Office minister David Lidington repeatedly ducked questions on whether Smith had asked other MPs to break their pairs, following reports from BuzzFeed News and other outlets.
Tory MPs — many of them arch Brexiteers — were poised, waiting for their moment to eulogise about Smith and the whips’ office.
Former party leader Iain Duncan Smith said pairing was an “informal arrangement” and “there are going to be mistakes made by both sides of the House on this”.
“I think the chief whip is doing an excellent job,” he boomed to cries of “hear hear” from his colleagues.
Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said: “This chief whip and his predecessors have always behaved with the utmost honesty and integrity, and the confected anger attacking my right honourable friend [Smith] doesn’t help the House, doesn’t help anybody for a system that generally works.”
And serial Tory rebel Philip Davies added: “I've had my fair share of run-ins with the chief whip but I have also always found him, even when we have fundamentally disagreed, to have been a man of complete honour, his word and integrity, and I have to say that goes for the other members of the whips office as well.”
Another Conservative MP, Peter Heaton-Jones, declared that everyone should now be “moving on”. “I have full faith in the integrity of our chief whip,” he said. “I have less faith in the true motives of the Liberal Democrats in bringing this forward.”
Colleague Huw Merriman also praised Smith, saying, “he’s not only a stickler for rules but he’s also very kind and compassionate when it comes to domestic matters”.
Andrew Percy said “honest mistakes do happen” but “what this incident proves is this is a process issue which interests the Westminster bubble but it certainly doesn’t interest my constituents”.
Lidington said the government was committed to providing a pairing system and insisted: “We do take the issue of pregnancy pairing particularly seriously.”
But he failed to answer a direct question from Labour's Stella Creasy on whether the chief whip had ~asked~ MPs to break their pairs deliberately. Lidington simply said that all pairs other than Lewis–Swinson had been honoured.