Tory MP Peter Bone should be suspended for six weeks for bullying and sexual misconduct, says report – UK politics live | Politics

Peter Bone has issued a statement saying that the bullying and sexual misconduct claims about him made by a former employeed, that have led to the IEP recommending a six-week suspension, are false and without foundation. He says the complainant did not raise them at the time and only submitted a complaint years after they had left.

As I have maintained throughout these proceedings, none of the misconduct allegations against me ever took place. They are false and untrue claims. They are without foundation.

The allegations by an ex-employee refer to events of more than 10 years ago that spanned no more than a few months. The complainant first made the allegations years after they left my employment. They did not raise them at any time during their employment, either in writing or verbally with me, nor with their line managers …

I can say that the allegations are the only allegations at all made against me throughout my work as an MP and beyond. Witness statements were submitted from ten employees (current and former) of the highest integrity, testifying to the professional, accommodating and friendly place my office is to work. Many others would be prepared to testify the same.

Bone also claims the inquiry into his behaviour was flawed, and he says he is taking legal advice as to whether the investigators “operated outside of the powers given to them by parliament”.

I am also firmly of the opinion that on this occasion the independent complaints and grievance scheme investigation was flawed, procedurally unfair and didn’t comply with its own rules and regulations. It is my belief that they have operated outside of the powers given to them by parliament and I am currently discussing with lawyers what action could and should be taken.

The full statement is on X.

The IEP report into Peter Bone says the complaints were made by a man working in the MP’s office in 2012 and 2013, when the misconduct happened. He complained to the Conservative party in 2017 and in 2021, with the Tory complaint still unresolved, the man took his complaint to the independent complaints and grievance scheme (ICGS), which did not exist at the time the bullying too place. In August 2022 he withdrew his complaint to the Conservative party, which cleared the way for the ICGS to conduct its own inquiry.

Under the ICGS process, an investigator examined the allegations, and their findings were reviewed by the parliamentary commissioner for standards. This is how the report summarises what the commissioner concluded.

The commissioner found the following allegations proved:

Allegation 1: Mr Bone “verbally belittled, ridiculed, abused and humiliated” the complainant, and this was bullying.

Allegation 2: Mr Bone “repeatedly physically struck and threw things at” the complainant, and this was bullying.

Allegation 3: Mr Bone “imposed an unwanted and humiliating ritual on” the complainant, namely instructing, or physically forcing, the complainant to put his hands in his lap when Mr Bone was unhappy with him or his work; and this was bullying.

Allegation 4.2: Mr Bone “repeatedly pressurised [the complainant] to give him a massage in the office” and this was bullying, but not sexual misconduct.

Allegation 4.3: Mr Bone indecently exposed himself to the complainant on an overseas trip, initially in the bathroom of the hotel room they were sharing and then in the bedroom. The commissioner concluded this was sexual misconduct.

Allegation 5: ostracised the complainant following the events subject to allegation 4.3, and this was bullying.

Bone appealed against these findings, but that appeal was rejected. He also appealed against the proposed six-week suspension, but that appeal was rejected too.

The Conservative MP Peter Bone should be suspended from the Commons for six weeks for bullying and sexual misconduct, the Commons independent expert panel has recommended.

In a report the IEP, which deals with bullying and sexual misconduct complaints against MPs, says the complainant first complained about Bone to the Conservative party in 2017. After that inquiry failed to reach a conclusion, that took the complaint to the parliamentary watchdog.

The IEP says:

Following an investigation by an independent investigator appointed by the ICGS [independent complaints and grievance scheme], the parliamentary commissioner for standards upheld five allegations of bullying and one of sexual misconduct. Mr Bone appealed this decision to the IEP. That appeal was dismissed by the IEP sub-panel appointed to consider that case as having raised no substantive grounds.

The sub-panel then determined that Mr Bone should be suspended for six weeks. It stated that: “This is a serious case of misconduct. […] The bullying involved violence, shouting and swearing, mocking, belittling and humiliating behaviour, and ostracism. […] This wilful pattern of bullying also included an unwanted incident of sexual misconduct, when the complainant was trapped in a room with the respondent in a hotel in Madrid, […]. This was a deliberate and conscious abuse of power using a sexual mechanism: indecent exposure.”

Mr Bone appealed the sanction to a fresh IEP sub-panel. They dismissed his appeal, and confirmed the original decision.

If the Commons votes to confirm the suspension, Bone could be subject to a recall election in his Wellingborough constituency, where he had a majority of 18,540 at the last election.

Rishi Sunak has recorded a pooled clip for broadcasters this morning about the Israel-Hamas war during a visit to a Jewish school in London. Here are the main points he made, many of which he is likely to repeat in the Commons later, where he is due to make a statement to MPs in the afternoon.

There is no place in our society for antisemitism and we will do everything we can to stamp it out and where it happens, it will be met with the full force of the law.

We’ve spent time with the police to make sure they have all the tools, powers and guidance they need to police protests over the weekend appropriately, and strike that right balance.

It’s a difficult job, but I’m grateful to them for everything that they’ve done. They’ve made several arrests, but they’re also now reviewing footage of some of the things that many people would have seen that are just simply not acceptable and where they can they will be able to make further arrests.

Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, it’s very clear under the law, the support and glorification of Hamas is illegal, and those offences are punishable with up to almost 14 years in jail.

• He defended what Israel was doing in Gaza, but said he had urged the country to minimise the impact on Palestinian civilians as much as possible. He said:

I’ve raised with the Israeli prime minister the need to minimise the impact on civilians as best we can. I’ve raised the humanitarian situation. We will continue to do that with other allies around the region as well.

But again, Israel has given people advance notice of what’s happening, given them the opportunity to leave and it’s Hamas who is now telling people to stay behind, it’s Hamas that is embedding itself inside civilian populations and that is just example of the barbarity with which they operate.

James Heappey, the armed forces minister, was doing a morning interview round on behalf of the government earlier. Speaking about the Israel-Hamas war, he told LBC that he thought Israel was “balancing correctly” the need to protect protect innocent lives against the need to deal with Hamas effectively.

Asked whether the government supports the blockade of water, medical supplies and power from Gaza, Heappey told LBC:

I think what we are recognising is that there is military necessity rubbing up against humanitarian necessity and what we’re saying to Israel is that they need and are, need to show the balance between those two imperatives.

Echoing the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, Heappey said democracies hold themselves to a “higher standard” and “of course we are encouraging Israel to make sure it does hold itself to that higher standard”. He went on:

It is the devil’s own choice that Israel has got to make but for my money they are balancing correctly the need to preserve innocent human life as best they possibly can while accepting that the adversary that they will soon launch an attack on, uses humans and shields and deliberately seeks to hide within civilian population and infrastructure.

Good morning. Governments that have been in power a long time often have to reverse decisions they have taken earlier, but under this administration this practice has become endemic. Two of the most important acts of public service reform under David Cameron were privatisation of the probation service and the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which put competitive tendering at the heart of the provision of NHS services. Both reforms were subsequently regarded as flawed (or disastrous in the case of probation), and reversed. On tax, the Tories spent the first half of their time in office reducing corporation tax, and putting the income tax allowance up. Now they’re doing the opposite. At the Tory conference Rishi Sunak announced a colossal U-turn on HS2, one of the biggest infrastructure schemes in British history. And today, on sentencing police, Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, is set to announce another U-turn.

Arguably, it’s a U-turn on a U-turn. When David Gauke was justice secretary in 2019, he announced plans to abolish short-term jail sentences. A few months later Boris Johnson became MP, Robert Buckland replaced Gauke as justice secretary, and the plans were ditched. Today, in a statement to MPs, Chalk will revive them.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, Chalk said:

We need to keep people safe – and that means moving away from short-term prison sentences that make hardened criminals rather than rehabilitated offenders. So we need to look again at low-level offenders. Because while the overall reoffending rate is 25%, the rate for people who spend fewer than 12 months in prison is over 50%.

A short stretch of a few months inside isn’t enough time to rehabilitate criminals, but is more than enough to dislocate them from the family, work and home connections that keep them from crime. Too often, offenders routinely turn back to crime as soon as they walk out of the prison gates.

No prison system should further criminalise offenders or trap criminals who might otherwise take the right path in a cycle of criminality through a merry-go-round of short sentences. This is the wrong use of our prison system and taxpayers’ money. It doesn’t deliver for victims and it doesn’t cut crime. We need to fix this.

There are alternatives to having low level offenders languishing in prison. Judges can make them repay their debt to society in communities – cleaning up neighbourhoods, scrubbing graffiti off walls, and even helping to plant new forests. And with technology moving on rapidly, these options are growing. The latest GPS tags, for example, offer many more options than the radio frequency versions, which were the only ones available to the court when I first started my career as a prosecutor.

All this sounds quite liberal – and not the sort of thing likely to appeal to the Tory core vote which, as the party conference revealed, seems increasingly to be the focus of government policymaking. But Chalk is in a bind because the prisons in England and Wales are full. And so, as Helen Pidd reports, his announcement about phasing out short-term sentences will be combined with one about deporting more foreign criminals.

Ingeniously, the Ministry of Justice has even managed to put a punitive spin on abolishing short-term sentences. The Sunday Telegraph wrote a story based on Chalk’s article yesterday saying that he would be bringing Texas-style justice to the UK. Given that the best known fact about the Texas justice system is that it has by far the highest execution rate for any US state, this made it sound as if Chalk was embracing a policy about which even Suella Braverman might have second thoughts. But the headline was just based on a line in the Chalk article in which he said even US states like Texas were using tagging more for some offenders.

Danny Shaw, the BBC’s former home affairs correspondent, has a good take on X.

What a waste of 4 years.

On 18 July 2019, @DavidGauke – then Justice Secretary – announced limits on the use of short prison sentences to cut reoffending & reduce costs.

But 5 days later Gauke resigned. Boris Johnson became PM & the plans were scrapped.

Now, they’re back …

An acute shortage of prison places has forced the current Justice Secretary’s hand…

So @AlexChalkChelt is adopting Gauke’s 2019 plan – to get courts to use tough community sentences rather than 6 or 12 month jail terms.

Worth a try – but it must be evaluated properly…

There’ll also be other emergency measures from @AlexChalkChelt to free up space…

…like extending early release schemes…

… and trying (yet again) to persuade other countries to take back foreign offenders locked up here – there are 10,500 in jails in England/Wales …

To sweeten the early release pill @AlexChalkChelt will outline some tougher sentences…

…but this shouldn’t deflect from the big story here:

A grotesque failure by @MoJGovUK to plan for the rise in the prison population which its own statisticians had forecast.

In a statement issued yesterday, Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary, said the government was to blame for a “crisis of epic proportions” in prisons. She said:

The only thing Texan about this government is that they are running the country like cowboys.

13 years of reckless mismanagement of the criminal justice system has led to a crisis of epic proportions where they are now coming up with policy on the hoof, which does nothing to deal with the immediate overcrowding crisis …

With thousands of offences – including sexual offences – committed by people on bail every year, the government is seeking to distract from the issue at hand, instead of giving answers on how they plan to keep our streets safe now.

Labour would uphold law and order in this country by building the prison places we need and by putting criminals behind bars.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak makes a visit to show support for the Jewish community.

10.30am: The SNP conference resumes with a session on priorities for Scotland, debates on resolutions including one on wind turbines and a speech from Rhun ap Iowerth, the Plaid Cymru leader.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2pm: Keith Brown, the SNP’s deputy leader, addresses the SNP conference.

2.30pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: Sunak makes a statement about the Israel-Hamas war.

After 4.30pm: Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, makes a statement about prisons.

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