Under cover

For months now, details have been leaking out of how MPs, Ministers and advisors have either enriched themselves or their friends and backers got rich from contracts for PPE and other COVID related contracts, all pretty much done without oversight, scrutiny and funnelled through "VIP" lanes, circumventing usual approval, and meaning that companies and people with no experience on a field could jump the queue ahead of those more experienced but without political connections.

Huge amounts were spent on these contracts, the Civil Service put under huge pressure to put aside their concerns, and so vast amounts were ordered, mostly vastly overpriced and in such qualntities there was no way of checking the quality of what was suppplied. In some case all what was supplied was sub-standard, and yet the Government didn't try to recover the costs.

Even now, thousands of freight containers are stacked up across East Anglian, mostly on former military sites, full of unknown amounts and of unknown quality items of PPE.

The Owen Patterson case and that of Geoffery Cox has opened the door on another front of corruption; the second (an more) jobs that MPs and Minister have alongside their main job of representing their constituents.

Let us be honest here, many are paid to put their second employer's views, or the views of a sector, through the mouth of an MP, able to speak directly with a Minister or raise questions in The House.

Such payment has been against the House rules since the end of the 17th century, and yet there it is, happening now.

So, in order to quell public revulsion, the PM is trying to rush through new rules to stop such paid advocacy. There will be a vote at the end of Wednesday, and it is likely that JOhnson will lose it, as turkeys don't vote for Christmas, and see their additional wage streams closed off.

It stinks.

All of it, and for the most part, until the last two weeks, ignored by most of the media, and only kept going by the work of the Good Law Project, who is litigating the Government again and again to get information about the amount spent and what was secured in return. Such corruption would not be out of place in a Banana Republic, and yet is happening here too, and has been for many years, but never quite so brazen.

If Tory backbenchers throw out these weak rules, what then? Mr Cox worked for the Government of the British Virgin Isles for three months to earn his £3,000,000, actually in the Virgin Islands, doing is political duties via zoom and voting by proxy, all with the Conservative Cheif Whip's approval.

That it was done is bad, that MPs think there's nothing wrong is far, far worse.