Labour is to force a Commons vote on banning MPs from holding some second jobs, amid the ongoing sleaze scandal in Westminster.
Keir Starmer revealed he will use Wednesday’s opposition day debate, which Labour controls, to hold a vote on preventing MPs from taking paid consultancies or directorships.
In an interview with LBC, Starmer said the vote offered a way to “clean up” politics following the row over former cabinet minister Owen Paterson’s breach of lobbying rules.
“It is for every MP to decide how they want to vote on that. That will perhaps be a measure of where people are on how we actually move this forward,” Starmer said. “How do we clean this up? We clean this up by drawing a very stark line – no paid consultancies, no directorships.”
On Monday, MPs will vote on whether to scrap the changes to the rules the government pushed through the Commons which blocked Paterson from being suspended and handed oversight of standards to a Tory-majority committee.
Following a backlash, including from Tory MPs, Boris Johnson abandoned the plan and agreed to allow a vote to overturn the move.
The prime minister admitted for the first time on Sunday that he could have handled the Paterson affair “better”.
Johnson has seen his party and his own personal ratings plummet in opinion polls since the government’s controversial bid to tear up the Commons standards system, with a host of surveys suggesting the Tories have lost their lead over Labour since the sleaze row broke out.
Amid a flurry of accusations of sleaze, Conservative Party chairman Oliver Dowden said the UK was an “exceptionally long way” from being a “corrupt country”.