Standards in Public Life

The right hon. and learned Gentleman always comes to the Dispatch Box and eruditely dances on a pinhead to justify his paymaster. Fundamentally, the difference is that when my party was in government, Ministers were sacked for lesser things than have been done recently, because the Prime Ministers of the day had regard to the standards in public life and had no truck with anyone who crossed the line. That is surely the difference in respect of what we all want to see—and, actually, given what we can see on the Government Benches, what a lot of the Minister’s party would like to see.