Westminster MPs
The Guardian has got its knickers in a real twist over a Tory MP, Grant Shapps, who has in the past been doing extra-parliamentary work in addition to his day job as an Westminster MP.
Now I happen to think that being an MP or an MSP for that matter is a full-time occupation and that elected politicians should not be able to take on additional remunerated employment.
But for most of the current 2010-2015 Parliament there has been a much more obvious example of a moonlighting MP in the House of Commons - in the shape of Gordon Brown, the former Labour Party leader and Prime Minister.
Yet I don't recall The Guardian making a fuss about Gordon Brown's regular absences from the House of Commons, perhaps because it's regarded as a Labour friendly newspaper which doesn't go after Labour MPs.
Grant Shapps admits he 'screwed up' dates in second job row
Tory chairman faces calls to resign after revelation he was still using pseudonym to work as millionaire marketer a year after his election
Grant Shapps has been forced to admit that he worked as a web marketer under a pseudonym after entering parliament.
By Randeep Ramesh and Rowena Mason - The Guardian
The Conservative party chairman, Grant Shapps, has admitted he “screwed up” the dates when he denied ever holding a second job as an MP, after it emerged he was still using a pseudonym to work as a millionaire marketer a year after his election.
The senior Conservative, who is in charge of the party’s election campaign, told the BBC that he had denied holding a second job “over firmly” when he was interviewed about it on LBC Radio several weeks ago.
Initially, Shapps had dismissed the report, tweeting: “Old story: all properly declared at the time and all many years ago. Labour just hate business.”
However, he is now facing calls to resign from Labour and Ukip, who have accused him of not telling the truth.
Shapps, who used the pseudonym Michael Green, has repeatedly denied having a second job for three years, but the Guardian has discovered a recording from the summer of 2006 in which the Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield boasts his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”.
Rather than running down his operations, it appears that in 2006 Shapps was expanding the company. In a recording made in the summer of that year, the Tory MP says he would be running his “mentoring programme” to hire 10 staff over the following months, produce software to create websites that “Google prefers” and start selling “Stinking Rich 3”, the latest tome in a range of self-help guides that claim to make customers wealthy and which “sell fantastically well”.
Posing as Green, Shapps tells fellow web entrepreneur Peter Twist that “[Stinking Rich] is not a cheap product, but it’s a great internet marketing product”. At no point in the 40-minute sales pitch does Shapps reveal his true identity.
On Sunday night, Labour called for an inquiry to get to the bottom of Shapps’s repeated denials and efforts to stop the story emerging.
Live Grant Shapps under pressure over second job revelation: Politics Live blog
Andrew Sparrow’s rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including reaction to the revelations about Grant Shapps’ second job and Nicola Sturgeon’s speech
Karl Turner, Labour’s shadow solicitor general, said: “It beggars belief that the chairman of the Conservative party went on live radio just three weeks ago and stated three times that he was not doing business as Michael Green while he was an MP, when new reports and audio tonight show quite clearly that he did.
“It seems that Mr Shapps’s repeated denials, which were not in the heat of the moment but also included a calculated decision to instruct solicitors, were contrary to the facts. He also appears to have threatened legal action on the basis of this.
“David Cameron must now order an immediate inquiry into Mr Shapps’s conduct and establish all the facts in the interest of the public.”
John Mann, the Labour MP, then told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Shapps should resign as a minister and as Tory chairman for not telling the truth about his second job.
He said: “[He has breached] the principle of openness and honesty. He didn’t say at the time that he was operating in this way and the point of the openness principle is that it allows the general public to judge each and every MP on their actions, but far worse than that he then denied that he had done it. That is not telling the truth, and honesty and integrity are two of those two key principles.
“He’s not any old MP – he’s chairman of the Conservative party and he was talking specifically in an interview about second jobs and he had a second job. I think he should go as minister without portfolio. The government made a big play, after the expenses scandal, of bringing back integrity into politics. This does exactly the opposite – you can’t have a government minister who isn’t honest and breaches one of those standards and that’s what they are there for.”
Mann also claimed that Shapps told constituents in a residents’ newsletter in 2005 that he no longer had any “direct input” into the print business and was completely devoted to his job as a “full-time MP”.
“Shapps says he confused the dates. His post on Brookmans Park forum of 4 June 2005 contradicts this entirely,” Mann said.
However, allies of Shapps hit back, saying the coverage of the story was out of proportion. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, tweeted: “Unbelievable Lab/Guard/BBC attack on @grantshapps. His sin not 2 use pseudonym but 2 write books about how 2 create wealth – shock horror …”
Shapps’s entry in the parliamentary register of members’ interest for 2005 and 2006 lists his directorships and shareholdings in a printing firm and How To Corp, the “marketing” company then fronted by Michael Green.
But since 2012, when pictures emerged of Shapps taken in 2004 at a $3,000-a-head US internet conference wearing a badge describing himself as “Michael Green”, the MP has consistently said he stopped being Green after taking his seat in the Commons.
When confronted with the audio, which shows he was still operating as Green more than a year after the 2005 general election, a Tory party spokesman said Shapps now conceded “his writing career [as Green] … ended shortly after [becoming an MP]”.
Although How To Corp was registered at an office in Pinner, north-west London, its products and services were priced in US dollars, and in its product materials How To Corp said it had an office the US and listed US phone and fax numbers. There was no record of the company when the Guardian checked with US state authorities. None of the webpages, ebooks, newsletters or audio recordings collected by the Guardian states that Shapps is Michael Green.
Before this concession, Shapps had gone to extraordinary lengths to insist he had never been Michael Green. Last November, the Tory party chairman used legal threats to force a local constituent and ex-Labour councillor to delete an allegedly libellous post on a Facebook group about his use of the pseudonym and replace it with an apology that explicitly states that he was not using the Michael Green pseudonym when he was an MP.
In papers seen by the Guardian, Shapp’s lawyers wrote to the constituent noting “your agreement to post an apology requires you [to] make a ‘new’ post [ie a post on the ‘homepage’ of the group, and not a comment on another post]”. The lawyers said Shapps wanted the apology to read: “Mr Shapps MP has at no time misled over the use of a pen name. Indeed, I now understand that he openly published his full name alongside business publications making it clear that he used a pen name merely to separate business and politics, prior to entering parliament.”
Shapps is not mentioned in How To Write a Newsletter, where in 2003 Green’s company says it was about to float on the stock exchange with a valuation of $28m (£19m). In fact, the company had been started by Shapps in 2000 and it was only registered at Companies House in 2005. The Tory MP transferred his share in the firm to his wife in 2008.
How To Corp was dissolved last year after it marketed web “scraping” software TrafficPaymaster – the sale of which, police have said, may have been an fraudulent. How to Corp’s websites have now disappeared from the internet and TrafficPaymaster, which claimed to produce web pages by “spinning and scraping” content and sought to attract advertising in contravention of Google’s code of conduct, is no longer on sale.
While traces of How to Corp were vanishing, Shapps continued insisting he did not use the name Michael Green while an MP. In September 2012, he told Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan that “before I went in to parliament I used to write business publications and, like many authors, write under a business name”.
As the issue of second jobs has risen up the political agenda, the Conservative party chairman has been taken to task over his controversial past – most recently by LBC’s Shelagh Fogarty, who extracted three denials from Shapps that he had worked as Michael Green after 2005.
A visibly annoyed Shapps – the radio programme is streamed on YouTube – brings the matter to an end by saying: “I thought the discussion here was second jobs whilst people are MPs. To be absolutely clear. I don’t have a second job. And I have never had a second job whilst I being an MP. End of story.”
However, on Sunday Shapps conceded that this was not correct. In a statement a spokesman for the Conservative party said: “Like many authors and journalists, Grant wrote with a pen name. This was completely transparent: his full name and biographical details were permanently published on the company’s main website. Given that this was a decade ago, and was mentioned during the cut and thrust of an interview, he referenced that his writing career had ended when he became an MP: in fact it ended shortly afterwards.”
