Tory MP Peter Bone faces 6-week suspension after misconduct finding

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Conservative MP Peter Bone should face a six-week suspension from the House of Commons for bullying an employee and committing indecent exposure, a parliamentary watchdog has ruled.

If MPs approve the sanction, it would trigger a recall petition in Bone’s Wellingborough constituency in Northamptonshire, where the Tories have an 18,540 majority. If 10 per cent of voters in the constituency sign the petition, it would spark a by-election that would be a problem for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

A report published by parliament’s independent expert panel on Monday stated the parliamentary standards commissioner had found that five allegations made against Bone by a male former staffer over events in 2012 and 2013 were “proved”.

These included having “verbally belittled, ridiculed, abused and humiliated” the former employee, as well as having “repeatedly physically struck” and thrown pens and office equipment at him, both of which amounted to bullying.

The MP was also found to have “imposed an unwanted and humiliating ritual on” the staffer, which involved “instructing, or physically forcing, the complainant to put his hands in his lap when Mr Bone was unhappy with him or his work”.

This was found to have amounted to bullying, alongside another finding that Bone repeatedly pressurised the staffer to give him massages in the office.

The parliamentary commissioner meanwhile found Bone had committed sexual misconduct by indecently exposing “his genitals close to the complainant’s face” on an overseas work trip, first in the bathroom and then in the bedroom of a hotel room.

Bone booked the twin room for the pair and tried to keep the beds together, the watchdog found. After the alleged episode the MP was found to have ostracised the employee.

On Monday Bone, 70, said on the social media site X that the misconduct allegations were “false and untrue” and criticised the investigation into him as “flawed” and “procedurally unfair”.

The watchdog said that while Bone denied the claims throughout the investigation, the former staffer — who has not been named — offered “compelling, nuanced and plausible” evidence, including a contemporaneous log of many of the alleged events.

Two key witnesses at work, who were present when some of the alleged events occurred, also gave evidence in support of the former employee.

Bone, who claimed there was a conspiracy to invent false allegations against him, appealed against the parliamentary commissioner’s initial findings, but this was dismissed by a separate review sub-panel that said he did not raise substantive grounds to appeal.

This sub-panel, which included two senior barristers, decided on a sanction of six weeks’ suspension from the Commons for what it said was a “serious case of misconduct” in which Bone was “found to have committed many varied acts of bullying and one act of sexual misconduct”.

Bone appealed against the recommended sanction, but it was upheld after a separate review. MPs on the Commons standards committee will now vote on whether to approve the recommended suspension and put it to a vote of the entire House of Commons.

The watchdog noted that the former staffer first formally complained about the alleged events in 2017, when he submitted a complaint to the Conservatives, while his father made an earlier complaint to the party in 2015.

The timeline raises a question about whether Boris Johnson knew of the allegations when he, as prime minister, promoted Bone to the front bench position of deputy Commons leader last year. Bone continued to serve in the role during Liz Truss’s shortlived premiership.

On Monday, Bone said he was not permitted under the rules of parliament’s complaints process to fully respond to the allegations in public and was consulting his lawyers about his next step.