Mark Garnier has been MP for Wyre Forest since 2010 and is one of the few members who genuinely knew the financial markets before he reached the Commons, a long City career that gave him an unusual command of his brief. Whether he applied the same judgement to his own conduct is another question.

He brought real expertise. After more than two decades on the trading floor, including spells at Bear Stearns and running a hedge fund, he came in with a working knowledge of the markets the Treasury legislates for and used it on the Treasury Select Committee from his first day. He sat on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards that produced the Banking Reform Act 2013, the post crash settlement that ring fenced retail banking and tightened individual accountability. As a junior trade minister and then chair of the Committees on Arms Export Controls he did serious if low profile work. He was made OBE in 2024.

The episode that follows him is from October 2017. A former secretary alleged he had called her sugar tits in a bar in front of witnesses and, on another occasion, sent her to a Soho sex shop to buy two vibrators while he waited outside. He did not deny the facts. He told a newspaper the slur was a reference to a sitcom. A Cabinet Office inquiry by Sue Gray concluded he had not breached the ministerial code, but only because the conduct pre-dated his appointment as a minister. The technicality was the entire defence. He kept his job, was moved out at the next routine reshuffle, and emerged with his career intact and his reputation rather less so.

Other small things sit uncomfortably. He accepted a thousand pounds of Chelsea Flower Show hospitality from Japan Tobacco International, the kind of freebie a former tobacco friendly trade minister might decline, and earned tens of thousands of pounds as a paid adviser to two space sector firms during the same period the country was rowing about MPs' second jobs.

In 2024 he held Wyre Forest by 812 votes, Labour in second, Reform UK pushing hard into third, the kind of margin that turns a once safe seat into a marginal. Kemi Badenoch made him shadow economic secretary to the Treasury.

Garnier is genuinely expert on financial services, more useful on the Treasury Committee than most of his colleagues will ever be, and the banking reform work was a real contribution to the post crisis settlement. He is also a study in how thin the standards governing MPs' personal conduct can be, a politician saved from sanction by a procedural date rather than the merits of what he had done, whose career carried on as if nothing very much had happened. The knowledge is real. The judgement is not always its equal.