THE ‘cash for lobbying’ scandal has seen Conservative MP Damian Hinds face anger over his vote to change a process that would have censured fellow Tory MP Owen Paterson.

But the East Hampshire MP has not said sorry, insisting the system needed changing anyway.

He said: “There are legitimate concerns about the process, but they should have been considered separately from this or any other specific case.

“On this occasion we, and I, got it wrong, and I sincerely regret that.

“We should now look at reform proposals in slower time, on a cross-party basis, independent of any current case.”

It was the timing of the change proposals that angered many East Hampshire voters.

Boris Johnson tried to push through changes that may have seen Mr Paterson go unpunished. Mr Hinds voted for the changes, now abandoned in a U-turn by the prime minister.

The cross-party House of Commons committee on standards had concluded that Mr Paterson had brought parliament into disrepute with 14 approaches to ministers and public officials on behalf of paying clients – breaking parliamentary rules that have existed in various forms since the 17th

century.

Sir Charles Cockburn – who worked as a lobbyist for 35 years, was the founder of an ‘ethical political consultancy’ and lives in Beech – described the vote to overhaul the parliamentary standards system as “perhaps the single most shameful day for parliament of my near 71-year lifetime”.

Condemning Mr Johnson’s party as “a generation of Conservative MPs who know no shame”, he added to Mr Hinds: “I had thought you an exception to this general rule.”