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Conor Burns has quit as a trade minister after being suspended from parliament for a week for attempting to “intimidate” a member of the public by “abusing” his position to make “veiled threats” over a debt owed to his father.
Burns, an ally of Boris Johnson, resigned from the government after the Commons standards watchdog recommended a seven day suspension.
The Bournemouth West MP used Commons-headed notepaper to contact a member of the public about a longstanding debt that Burns believed their business owed his father.
In the letter, Burns said “failure to [pay] will ensure my involvement to secure the return of the money owed to my father”.
Burns also suggested he could use parliamentary privilege, which protects MPs from certain legal action if they speak out on a contentious subject, to attract “attention” and “interest” to the dispute.
In reference to the member of the public’s past role as a senior public servant, Burns added: “I am also conscious that your high profile role outside [the company] could well add to that attention.”
The matter was investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards Kathryn Stone, who found that Burns had “put personal interest before the public interest by suggesting that he would take advantage of his public office to pursue his father’s financial dispute”.
She also found that Burns’ use of headed notepaper was “more deliberate than accidental” and that the MP “should have realised that the words used in his letter would be received as a threat”. On the balance of probabilities, she added, she believed this was his intention.
The Commons standards committee backed Stone’s assessment that Burns had broken parliamentary rules.
An apology from the MP only came “at end of a process in which he initially sought to argue that he had acted within the rules”, the committee said.
“Like the commissioner, we are persuaded by the evidence that Burns used his parliamentary position in an attempt to intimidate a member of the public into doing as Burns wished, in a dispute relating to purely private family interests which had no connection with Burns’ parliamentary duties,” the committee said.
“Burns persisted in making veiled threats to use parliamentary privilege to further his family’s interests even during the course of the commissioner’s investigation.
“He also misleadingly implied that his conduct had the support of the house authorities.”
They said Burns was “guilty of abusing his privileged status in an attempt to intimidate a member of the public”.
The committee recommended that Burns be suspended for a week for a “serious failure to uphold the values and principles” of the Commons.
It also called on him to apologise in writing to the Commons speaker and the complainant, warning the committee could take further action if he does not comply “with the spirit as well as the letter” of the ruling.