A row has emerged following the news of an investigation into Tory MP Miriam Cates. Cates is one of her party’s few openly Christian and more conservative representatives and is the co-founder of the ‘rightist’ New Conservatives group of backbenchers.
A brief notice on the website for Parliament’s standards commissioner Daniel Greenberg said late last week that Cates is being investigated for “actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the House as a whole, or of its Members generally.” It gave no further details of the case, leaving voters guessing what the MP is accused of doing.
The specifics will be kept confidential until the commissioner’s inquiry is completed. The process has been branded untransparent because Cates is unable to comment on the open investigation. An op-ed in The Daily Telegraph argues:
It cannot be right for our elected representatives to have been accused of something that, on the face of it, sounds serious without their constituents and the public knowing what it is.
The paper adds that Cates, alongside three other Tory MPs who are being investigated for the same alleged offence, is suggested to have “attended an event during the COVID lockdown in 2020 that might have been construed as a breach of the rules, though the police have taken no action.”
Danny Kruger, who is Cates’ colleague at the New Conservatives—which he also co-founded—described the secrecy around the case as “an offence against natural justice” in itself. He suggested it is wrong that Cates is unable to offer “any kind of public defence,” adding: “We should do this better.”
Greenberg, the commissioner, is unlikely to comment on the investigation until it has been completed.
