A cabinet minister has said there is no “cultural issue” with Tory MPs after Crispin Blunt became the eighth Conservative during this parliament to lose the whip over allegations of sexual misconduct.
Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, said all the individual incidents were separate and that the prime minister expected due process in the investigation into Blunt.
Blunt, a former justice minister and the MP for Reigate, was arrested by police on Wednesday on suspicion of rape and possession of drugs, before being bailed. He said in a statement that he expected to be cleared and made reference to an allegation of “extortion” that he had previously reported to police.
Blunt’s suspension follows a string of unrelated cases in which Tory MPs have lost the whip over allegations of sexual misconduct, including Peter Bone, Julian Knight, Chris Pincher, David Warburton, Rob Roberts, Neil Parish and Imran Ahmad Khan.
Boris Johnson’s deputy chief whip, Pincher, stepped down as an MP after getting an eight-week suspension from parliament after an investigation that found he had groped two men at a private members’ club in 2022.
Another Conservative MP, David Warburton, lost the whip in 2022 after the Sunday Times reported that he was facing allegations from three women. He quit earlier this year because he felt he was denied a fair hearing by the watchdog over the claims that he made unwanted advances.
Yet another Tory MP, Julian Knight, was stripped of the whip over an allegation of sexual misconduct, which he denied, saying he had been targeted by unfounded rumours. Police dropped an investigation, but the whip was not restored after the Conservatives said further complaints had been made to the whips’ office. He is not standing as an MP again.
Another former Conservative MP, Rob Roberts, is sitting as an independent after he was suspended from parliament for six weeks having been found by an independent panel to have made “significant” repeated and unwanted sexual advances towards a former member of staff and used “his position as his employer to place him under pressure to accede”.
Bone was suspended for six weeks after a report found that he had bullied a staff member and exposed his genitals to them, while Parish stood down as an MP after admitting watching pornography in the House of Commons.
Khan exited parliament after being sent to prison for plying a 15-year-old boy with gin and sexually assaulting him at a party in 2008.
Keegan said the allegations against Blunt were “serious allegations, and I think once the whip has been suspended … all you can do in these cases is support the institutions that are involved. If the police are involved, then support them to do their job.”
She told Times Radio: “I certainly don’t see a cultural issue among Conservative MPs. I see individual incidents, which are all investigated as such.”
“The PM’s been clear about high standards. He expects high standards and he always follows due process. But all you can do with these things is deal with them as they arise and take the appropriate action.”
Blunt has been asked to stay away from parliament during the police investigation. But the FDA, the union for senior civil servants, renewed its calls for MPs to be banned from the estate while serious allegations are investigated.
Dave Penman, the FDA general secretary, said: “Once again parliament finds itself in the position where there are serious allegations of sexual misconduct against an MP … Once again we call on the leader of the house to bring forward an urgent vote on this issue and parliamentarians themselves to recognise the responsibility they have to protect the staff and visitors for whom parliament is ultimately a workplace like any other.”
Earlier this year, MPs debated whether they should be barred from entering the parliamentary estate if they are subject to police investigation, but there was no vote on the proposal.
The debate followed a report from the House of Commons commission that outlined plans for MPs and peers under police investigation to be subject to a risk assessment carried out by a panel of officials.
