Christopher Pincher, the government deputy chief whip until Thursday last week, has resigned following allegations that he groped two men at the Carlton Club in central London. Pincher becomes the fifth Tory MP to be disgraced by a sex-related scandal since April. A Tory party source has privately offered a reaction to the papers: “The PM thinks he’s done the decent thing by resigning. There is no need for an investigation and no need to suspend the whip.”
Pincher has resigned once before as a whip, in 2017, over allegations that he made an unwanted pass at the Conservative activist Alex Story. He was nevertheless made deputy chief whip thereafter by Theresa May in 2018. He was reappointed to the position by Boris Johnson in February: although the Prime Minister initially intended to make him chief whip, he was forced to make him deputy after “colleagues found out and pushed back”, a Tory MP tells me. It has now been revealed, according to a formal letter from Simon McDonald, that the PM was briefed in person about a 2019 complaint of alleged groping – and yet he still made Pincher deputy chief whip.
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