The last fourteen months have been extraordinarily difficult as I have sought to fight malicious allegations in two connected investigations, leaving my constituents with less than the full representation in Parliament that they deserve. Those making the allegations have been allowed full rein and received no reprimand for treating the confidentiality of the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme with contempt. While they have published their claims across the media, I have been prevented by the ICGS from speaking out. I have also been barred – on pain of sanction - from revealing anything of the flawed investigation itself, as it moves at a cripplingly glacial pace towards a predetermined conclusion.

I have been prevented from divulging that it was a full 85 days after the national media detailed claims against me before I was even informed that such investigations existed. That it was 50 further days before I was invited to meet the investigator, who took 63 days to arrange to meet my first witness. ICGS standard guidelines set 5 calendar days between meeting an investigator and receiving from them a transcript or minutes of that meeting. I received mine after 83 days. This disgraceful timeframe has been studiously maintained throughout, to the unutterable detriment to the claimants, to my constituents and to me. [..]

I have been prevented from revealing either that the first investigation against me was dismissed, that the claimant falsified evidence, or that the second claimant was witness to the first and vice-versa. [...]

[...] You will appreciate that given the above, any defence is impossible, by design.

The ICGS is permitted to investigate according to its own rules and, it would seem, in its own time. It answers to no legal obligation. The mechanics of its processes, methodology and procedure as they apply to any one case accept no public or judicial challenge. Indeed, they are not permitted to be discussed. So it is also free to break its own rules and guidelines.

But its decisions affect lives. MPs and staff in Westminster are defenceless – in every sense - to this catastrophic abuse of power. A power wilfully entrenched further by its own conditions of confidentiality.

The obstructions I have outlined reveal a spectacular level of distain for any search for truth, and expose the precarious vulnerability of justice inside the parliamentary estate. This needs to be laid bare. It needs to be addressed. But, in laying it bare, I must resign and step down from parliament.