Chris bryant

Dodgy donors, crumbling conventions, crooked kickbacks and sexual shenanigans – it’s a tough old time for decency in public life. So it’s a good thing then that we have Chris Bryant, the honourable member for Rhondda, to act as a one-man sleaze buster, battling heroically against those dastardly Tory tyrants.  Everywhere Mr S looks, Bryant is found: on air, in print, online, bewailing and bemoaning this rotten government in his Grand Poobah title of Chairman of the Committee on Standards. With quivering lip and pointed finger, he decries, berates and castigates, lacerating ministers with a self-righteous sermon or twenty. But is the moral high ground really so different to life

Ah, the Standards Committee. Where would we be without the parliamentary watchdog? The 14 men and women who sit on this panel have a noble task: policing behaviour within the Commons by overseeing the work of the Parliamentary Commissioner, Kathryn Stone.  Half the committee are lay members, who cannot ever have been members of either chamber; the others are seven MPs drawn from across the House. But unfortunately it seems that some of these MPs have been exhibiting less than exemplary behaviour that you might expect from those in such an exalted position. Take the committee’s chair, Chris Bryant. He was forced to declare in June that, almost two years late,