Saqib Bhatti

My hon. Friend always makes excellent points. I was going to talk about Gordon Brown later, but I will do so now. He raised the question back in September. He wanted to know what had gone on, and he was batted away. Has the Minister asked the Cabinet Secretary why the former Prime Minister was batted away? Did that former Prime Minister not have enough respect in No. 10 to get a legitimate answer about what went down? The public deserve to know, and this House deserves to know. I want to make another point about integrity, which was raised by a number of Members earlier, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith). The Prime Minister, by his own admission, has called into question the integrity of every Member of this House. We all know that trust in politicians is at an all-time low—we see it on the doorstep and in our inboxes. I was at a birthday party with my four-and-a-half-year-old son at the weekend. I was chatting to some parents, and the Mandelson headlines came up. I had to say, “Look, it’s not normal for a billionaire to fly politicians out. We have a pretty strict expenses regime following the expenses scandal.” We cannot move left or right, yet the British public do not trust us, because they think that we take them for granted. I had to explain to those parents that it is not normal to be invited to islands and to have luxuries thrown at you. This was not normal behaviour, yet the Prime Minister knew about this relationship and let it happen. That is a really important point.