Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Rachel Reeves Speaks to G&T on the Lobbying Row

Labour's Rachel Reeves has told G&T on Sunday, on Times Radio, that no stone should be "left unturned" when asked if all Parliamentarians should be banned from lobbying for commercial interests.

Speaking to Gloria De Piero and Tom Newton Dunn the Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster responded to the question by answering:

I don't want to see any stone left unturned when it comes to investigating wrongdoing. We're having this conversation because of a sleaze that is engulfing the Conservative Party today where ministers are being lobbied by their former colleagues which is influencing the decisions they are making and the taxpayers' money that they are handing out. So I don't want any stone to be left unturned. But let's be very clear. Standards have deteriorated significantly in the last eleven years under this Conservative government. The rules that they have in place are toothless and they're not working. They must be toughened up and this government must deal with the sleaze that is engulfing them and is damaging our democracy and the very essence of public service. This is why this is so damaging, so corrosive. And it's why the government must sort it out as a matter of urgency.

And Rachel Reeves said Chancellor Rishi Sunak has failed to act in the "national interest" when dealing with David Cameron and the Greensill text messages:

This is about the lobbying of government ministers. The people with power to change things, the people with power to deliver contracts, the people with power to change the rules about government schemes. That is what David Cameron was trying to influence. Not trying to influence an opposition party but trying to influence the government who have the use of taxpayers' money. Taxpayers' money should always be used in the national interest. The Chancellor should be the custodian of the public finances and always acting in the national interest. Instead he was, according to his own text messages, pushing officials at the Treasury to look to see what they could do to help his old boss David Cameron and David Cameron's news boss Lex Greensill. This all happened at the peak of the pandemic last year when everybody should have been pulling together, as we did as a country, in the national interest not to line our own pockets. What David Cameron was doing, ably assisted by serving government ministers today.