It is hard sometimes to understand what goes through the mind of MPs when confronted with allegations of sleaze.

Faced with a damning report on the conduct of Owen Paterson, the Conservative party pressed the panic button and went into a political tailspin as it tried to heap all the blame on someone else.

That someone else was the standards watchdog, which had investigated Mr Paterson and concluded that he had indeed breached the rules on paid advocacy and should be suspended from the Commons for 30 days.

The findings did not impress the government.

It decided the best way to deal with them was to get MPs to back a review of the watchdog and come up with a different model of scrutiny - one, presumably, that would not be quite as forensic and would enable them to spare Mr Paterson, at least temporarily.

Conservative backbenchers duly lined up to traduce the watchdog, arguing it was not fit for purpose - but in a bout of collective amnesia seemed to have forgotten they had supported its creation back in 2009 in the wake of the expenses scandal.

South Thanet MP Craig Mackinay, who had his own brush with the Commissioner in 2018 and was found to have been in breach of rules on declaring financial interests, did at least acknowledged that the government should have acted to reform the code earlier.

No-one in the Conservative government seemed able to explain why, when it had been in office for a decade, it had not instigated such a review before now.

That’s because the motivation was nothing to do with reforming the way allegations were investigated.

It didn’t take long for MPs to realise they had spectacularly misread the public mood, reflected in a slew of front-page headlines about the return of sleaze.

An abrupt u-turn followed in which, without a shred of humility, the government changed its mind and agreed that there should after all be a vote on Mr Paterson.

He then threw a spanner in the works and quit as an MP.

In his resignation letter he wrote about the cruelty of politics, seemingly unable to recognise that voters might take a dim view of the fact that he had been paid more than £100,000 by two firms to lobby on their behalf.

A 175-page report by the standards watchdog branded his lobbying “egregious” and concluded: “No previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of confusion between the private and public interest.”

On the wider repercussions, the sorry saga once again raises questions about the Prime Minister’s judgement.

There are plenty of backbench MPs deeply unhappy and feel the episode has further corroded public faith in politics.

The dismay is replicated among activists and party members.

As one put it: “If you are going to reform the system, for goodness sake do it when there isn’t a high profile case being investigated.”

As to how Conservative MPs will vote on Mr Paterson’s transgressions now they are off the leash will be interesting.

AS the climate change conference passes the half-way mark, has it been just a lot of hot air passing for genuine global collaboration?

The key feature of international summits like this is that the aim is to secure a consensus around a collection of well-meaning concordats heavy on targets that in five years time everyone will have forgotten about.

As the leaders of the free world have been driven back to their private jets, there’s a sense that this may in the end be a conference that is all blah, blah, blah - or jaw jaw jaw.

Head to our politics page for expert analysis and all the latest news from your politicians and councils.

Read more: All the latest news from Kent