Sir Chris Bryant has written a book about sleaze, corruption, and dishonesty in politics, and has spent the morning promoting it on television. He appeared on Good Morning Britain today to insist politicians “really have to do better“, and lamented the ‘normalisation’ of “lying to Parliament”. He’s particularly upset about MPs refusing to correct the record for misleading the Commons…

Maybe the book will explain why, after over a year, he still hasn’t corrected the record for his claim about Nigel Farage. In March 2022, Bryant stood up in the Commons and declared it an outrage that Farage had supposedly taken “£548,573 from Russia Today in 2018 alone […] from the Russian state“, and that he should be sanctioned by the government:

Under the protection of parliamentary privilege, he got away with making a claim which was completely untrue. The £548,573 figure was the total sum for all of Farage’s media appearances up to 2018, including the lucrative fees for his LBC show. Farage didn’t appear on Russia Today at all in 2018, and says he has had two appearance fees in total worth “well under £5,000”. Not quite half-a-million…

For some reason, Bryant hasn’t mentioned this claim anywhere else since, and is pretending it never happened. Perhaps because, without parliamentary privilege, he knows he’d find a lawyer’s letter in his post by tomorrow. Falsely claiming someone has taken over £500,000 from the Russian state would be costly in the courts…

Bryant was one of the most egregious of the expense-fiddling MPs, making a £649,500 profit out of rent-swapping at the taxpayer’s expense. For years he rented out his Bloomsbury flat for £3,000-a-month whilst charging his rent on another London property to expenses.  When Guido challenged him about this years ago, asking why he didn’t live in the Bloomsbury flat or sell it, he claimed somewhat dishonestly that the flat was “in negative equity”. Which would have made it the only flat in London to have gone down in price…