Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhuss, and after a string of high-profile scandals over bullying, harassment and

corruption in Westminster, with me to discuss what needs to be done to clean up Parliament and rebuild

trust in politics. We have Dave Penman, General Secretary of the FDA

Union, which represents senior civil servants, as well as Fleur Anderson, Labour MP and the Shadow

Paymasser General, alongside John Girlis from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

So I'll probably get into some of the more systemic issues and the nottier subject of lobbying and influence.

But the reason I wanted to talk about standards in the first place, probably, was to do with Dominic Raab, where we are now in the case.

There's been, I think, around 24 complaints of more and more stories keep coming out as this investigation into him goes along.

You know, Dave, you wrote to the Prime Minister

saying that he needs to get his ethics advisor involved as well because the current terms of inquiry

are that only that Sir Adam Tully, he will establish the facts surrounding the claims. You know,

why do you want Laurie Magnus to join that process? So if you look at what would normally happen

had the Prime Minister had an ethics advisor at the time he launched the complaint, what would happen is someone essentially would, the terminology you use, establish the facts. They would go, they would interview people, they would get the evidence from civil servants, they would put that to Dominic Rab and that evidence would sit there. And what then happens is someone has to interpret that evidence.

Someone has to look at it and say, look, does this satisfy what you would say by a definition

of bullying?

What definition of bullying are you going to choose?

Which was a bit of an issue when it came to the Prime Minister's decision previously about

the former Home Secretary and then say, okay then, is that then a breach in the ministerial code?

So just now there's no one doing that, essentially.

And so as we saw with the Pretty Patel case, the ethics advisor had someone established in the fact, civil servants in this case.

He then looked at it and said, this was bullying.

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