Tory MP Adam Afriyie has been declared bankrupt in a specialist court. According to PA, a bankruptcy order was made against the gilded Afriyie, MP for Windsor, at an online hearing in the Insolvency and Companies Court today.

Last November, The Guardian revealed that Afriyie was facing bankruptcy proceedings over unpaid taxes. Before Parliament, Afriyie set up IT firm Connect Support Services. It did so well he took a four-storey house in Great College St just by the Palace of Westminster. His firm went into insolvency in 2017 with £1.7 million owed to HMRC. His announcement in the summer that he was stepping down is given added poignancy by this news: bankrupt MPs have to relinquish their seat…

UPDATE: Afriyie has released a statement:

“This has been ongoing for many years following business failures some time ago. I am ultimately responsible for some of the bank borrowing through personal guarantee. I’ve been trying to sell our home and downsize for some time, but it’s a tough market.

“It is a stressful time and it’ll be tough for a while, but I’m far from the only person in a difficult position, and I will continue to do my best to support my constituents until the next general election when I’ll be standing down.”

Chris Bryant is giving a speech at the University of Westminster this evening on “truth, honesty and integrity.” In full, the ‘Civility in Politics 2022’ winner will talk on:

• The importance of truth, honesty and integrity in public office and in news reporting
• The role of algorithms in filtering news & their distorting effect on the truth
• How news providers stir up hatred and drive divisive agendas to generate clicks and the advertising revenue which follows
• Why it is essential that news publishers are bound by robust standards on accuracy – the integrity of our democracy relies on it

Chris Bryant should pause the pontificating until he spends some time on introspection…

Since Bryant won the civility in politics award – the irony of which Guido detailed here – he’s not stopped putting his foot in it.

A month after winning it he was forced to apologise for false claims he’d made in Parliament, the outcome of an unprecedented legal challenge that saw his parliamentary privilege come unstuck. Not just a minor false allegation – accusing Christopher Chandler of money laundering and being a Russian spy…

As Chris lectures students on how “news providers stir up hatred and drive divisive agendas”, he may want to think about his description of Liz Truss’s new batch of ministers:

“It feels like pretty much anyone with a brain, a conscience and a work ethic has been purged from government either by Johnson or Truss. It’s an empty vessel of a government – loud, noisy but dangerously vacuous.”

When he turns to “the importance of truth, honesty and integrity in public office”, he will surely mention his recent smearing of Tory MPs by falsely claiming – on the floor of the House – he had witnessed bullying in the voting lobbies the night of the fracking vote. He is yet to correct the record…

On the topic of calling on news publishers to be “bound by robust standards on accuracy”, he may choose to mention how even the BBC managed to show him up when he accused them of failing to mention Kate Andrews “is part of the [IEA]” when she appeared on Question Time last month. Of course she isn’t, and he didn’t back down when this inaccurate bullying of a female columnist was called out…

Anyone wanting to watch the speech can reserve a spot here. Guido, for one, will be giving it a miss…

Sir Keir has unveiled his 155-page door-stopper for “a new Britain”, in which he promises to replace the House of Lords, appoint a new anti-corruption commissioner, and move 50,000 civil service jobs out of London. It also reignites the second jobs melodrama that gripped SW1 last year, by promising to ban “the vast majority” of them to “remove conflicts of interest”:

“Second jobs are banned in the American Congress, but a quarter of Conservative MPs had second jobs. In 2012, over 200 MPs received earnings on top of their £65,738 salary. Many were small payments for journalism or the like, but additional earnings as high as £1m were recorded, which means significant time and effort spent on non-parliamentary business.”

The only exceptions will be “for employment required to maintain professional memberships, such as medicine.” Presumably the hundreds of thousands of pounds that shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy has racked up in speaking fees and presenting gigs falls slightly out of the “small payments” remit. Likewise, the £25,934.18 Starmer has declared in legal fees over the last two years isn’t chump change either. Who footed the £17,598.60 bill for 70 hours of Starmer’s time just before he became leader?

Owen Paterson – remember him? – is suing the government over Parliament’s ruling that he broke lobbying rules last year. He claims the probe into his actions broke his “right to privacy“, and that the revelations “damaged his good reputation”… according to the European Convention of Human Rights. Yes, he’s suing the government in the ECHR…

This will probably come as a surprise to Paterson’s learned friends in Strasbourg. Here’s what he had to say about the ECHR in 2014:

Speaking to the G20 Lobby press pack, Rishi Sunak has said he’s sticking by Dominic Raab, two days after harrowing allegations emerged that the Deputy Prime Minister once removed tomatoes from his Pret salad and threw them into a bag “making a loud noise,” in front of civil servants. An act so debilitating for witnesses that one felt the need to leak it to the Sun…

Speaking in Bali, Rishi Sunak told the press that he “doesn’t recognise that characterisation of Dominic and I’m not aware of any formal complaints about him.”

In the latest attempt by a scalp-addicted Lobby to engineer the resignation of Raab, ITV reported this morning that 40% of Foreign Office civil servants felt they had been bullied by someone while Raab was Secretary of State. Difficult to bully staff while relaxing on a sun lounger…

After trying and failing to get Braverman sacked, and succeeding with Williamson, hacks are behaving like smack addicts, who after months of access to the good stuff are craving just one more hit from a Raab resignation. It’s all pretty desperate. Frankly, the narrative only serves to make overpaid, underworked civil servants look like babies who can’t handle a high-pressure work environment…