Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has suggested that members of the Committee on Standards who may make a decision on Nigel Farage are biased against Reform and its leader.
Speaking on GB News he said: “Is Nigel Farage facing a kangaroo court?
“The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner is investigating whether the Reform leader failed properly to register a £5 million present from cryptocurrency businessman Christopher Harborne, received before the 2024 general election.
“Nigel Farage says he may have missed a bit of paper. The question is whether the present should have been declared under Parliament’s rules, which state, and I quote, ‘Members are required to declare any financial interests which satisfy the test of relevance, including a past financial interests, normally limited to those active within the last 12 months’, and whether Nigel Farage’s failure to do so amounts to a breach of the member’s code of conduct.
“Mr Farage has just been overwhelmingly re-elected in Clacton after resigning his seat and triggering a by-election after the investigation was launched.
“But the question that must be asked now the investigation has recommenced is who could be judging him if it’s not resolved by the commissioner.
“The standards committee is made up of cross-party MPs and seven lay members who are not elected by anybody but have the same full voting rights as members of Parliament. Several of the MPs have been outspoken critics of Nigel Farage and Reform.
“Historically, the committee was chaired by a big figure, a big beast, often a former cabinet minister, but it’s now chaired by a little-known Conservative called Alberto Costa, who relished his role in the kangaroo court that did in Boris.
“Some of its members have also been extremely hostile to Farage and Reform. These comments may make it very difficult for the committee to act in the non-partisan way which is expected of it. They expect to act as MPs, not as Party politicians.
“For example, the Labour MP, Jill Furniss has accused Nigel of wanting to dismantle your NHS and of being anti-British.
“Labour’s Michael Wheeler wanted the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to investigate Reform for Islamophobia and said that Nigel Farage wanted to drag politics into the gutter.
“Gareth Snell, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, has also criticised Farage and Reform. Liberal Democrat MP Anna Sabine has described Nigel’s ideas as ‘vile’ and even criticized the BBC for giving him what she called disproportionate coverage.
“The committee members also, and these are the MP ones, by and large, very inexperienced, unlike previous committees, which tended to include more distinguished and long-serving parliamentarians who were at the end of their career than the beginning.
“So there’s a danger newer MPs are more likely to approach a case like this as partisan politicians, hoping to make their name, rather than as representatives of the institution.
“So let’s now move on to the lay members of the committee because the purpose of their membership is in theory to bring an independent perspective from outside Westminster.
“But they’re just quangocrats. The seven lay members come from a classic public sector quangocracy. The background of Michael Maguire is a former police ombudsman for Northern Ireland. Mehmuda Mian is a former BBC trustee, heaven help us, and an IPCC commissioner.
“Victoria Smith is a solicitor, Francis Habgood is a former senior police officer, and I believe the son of a former Archbishop of York.
“Dr. Rose Marie Parr is a former chief pharmaceutical officer for Scotland, and Dr David Stirling a senior clinical scientist and pathologist and Carys Williams is an Age UK chair, an NHS non-executive director.
“Some of them too have opposed Farage and Reform or Brexit or all of them. Habgood opposed a No Deal Brexit in support of the European Arrest Warrant while Parr made it clear that Scotland didn’t like Brexit, implying that was her view too.
“But most importantly, regardless of expertise, they are not elected members of Parliament. Yet they have the same voting rights when deciding whether an elected politician has breached Parliament’s rules.
“This brings their legitimacy into question. It seems to me it would be entirely improper for people who have not been elected to try to prevent Clacton from having the representative it has now chosen twice.
“If you look at the list of people I’ve read out, it is a DEI selection of people, but they have no diversity of public sector background and are in fact the greatest panjandrums of the Quango-serving class, who are threatened by everything Reform stands for.
“So inevitably they’ll be hostile to Nigel and can be expected to make kangaroos look respectable.”