This blog will refrain from passing judgment until after the C4 programme tonight, but there is a general point worth making. It is not whether rules have or have not been broken that causes public disquiet. It is the very idea that members of parliament are able to sell for personal gain the skills or connections they acquire by acting as representatives of voters at Westminster, where they are paid nearly three times the average salary as a backbencher and considerably more as a minister. Selling favours of any kind or making introductions for cash is seen as a form of soft corruption which most decent ‘hard working people who want to get on’ to use the favourite catchphrase of the hustings, deplore. So it does not matter whether they are guilty of breaking their own rules or not. The whole idea stinks.
One wonders why any genuine company would pay to hire people so naive as to fall into these fiscal honey traps set by newspapers anyway. Perhaps they don’t, which is why the traps always catch something.