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Keith Vaz said he could not afford to take out an injunction to stop a newspaper publishing details of his late night encounter with male escorts.

The Labour Leicester East MP said if he knew how the story would subsequently play out he would not have hesitated to take legal action to try to block the Sunday Mirror from running their expose.

Mr Vaz was this week found to have breached Parliament’s code of conduct by expressing a willingness to buy Class A drugs for the men who came to his flat at 11.30pm on August 27, 2016.

He now faces a six month suspension from the House of Commons.

The MP has not commented on the Committee on Standards ruling – other than to dispute parts of them – but it has published minutes of the evidence the MP gave to them last month.

The minutes, redacted to remove some details about the MP's health and family, go into detail about the case as committee members quiz Mr Vaz about various aspects of it, from his claim that he suffered amnesia after the encounter to his denial that men visiting him were actually prostitutes.

In the end the committee concluded Mr Vaz’s claims the men were interior decorators rather than male escorts were ‘frankly ludicricous’.

Why did Mr Vaz not seek an injunction?

The MP was asked by committee member Sir Christopher Chope why he had not sought to block publication of the story.

Mr Vaz said: “Sir Christopher, I don’t know whether you have ever been telephoned at 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon by a Sunday newspaper wanting to publish something about you.

“You have been in the House a long, long time

“They say to you, “What do you think about this?”

“I had legal advisers, but I did not know what they were talking about when they rang me.

“It was in the middle of a surgery - I was conducting a surgery with constituents on a Friday evening.

“They had not provided us with any written information to back up their story.

“They had provided us with nothing at all at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

“If I knew then what I know now, of course I would not have hesitated to have done it.

“It would have cost an enormous amount of money for us to take out an injunction.

“It would have been impossible for me to pay.

“I have never taken out an injunction before, but I gather that you need to brief people at very short notice.

“You have to go to a judge and you have to pay a huge amount of money.

“We are talking about up to £50,000 or £60,000.

“I did not have the capacity to pay that in that very short period of time,

“What lawyers have said since is that people like people threatening injunctions, because if you threaten an injunction it makes the story bigger.

“When he said that to me, I put this to my solicitor and he gave me the advice that he gave me.”

Why did the MP say the men visited him?

Committee member Dr Arun Midha pressed Mr Vaz on the reasons the men came to see him, after Mr Vaz said they were decorators not prostitutes.

Dr Midha: “Picking up from the Chair’s comments, your suggestion is that the two men who visited were painters and decorators, and that they subsequently turned out to be conmen.

“Reading the transcript, I was trying to identify some evidence that they were actually painters and decorators, and that the conversation focused around those activities.

“There seems to be a conversation taking place about travel, your pets etc., but there didn’t seem to be any conversation about decorating or painting with the two men.

“Do you have any thoughts on that?”

Keith Vaz: "No. I can’t remember, other than what has been given to us.”

Dr Midha: “Okay. Do you recollect what time they visited? The information that has been provided to us is that it was around 11.30pm on a Saturday evening.

Keith Vaz: “It was very late, because they had to do their work starting on the Monday, because Parliament was returning and we were leaving the house. We were going to live there.”

Dr Midha: “Recognising the amnesia - as I have said, you have had the opportunity to read the transcript - any reasonable person might conclude that sexual activity did take place. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Keith Vaz: “No.”

Dr Midha: “The commissioner has described significant parts of your evidence as “incredible”. Are you able at all to give us your thoughts now on what actually happened that evening with the two men?”

Keith Vaz: "Well, I have set it out already. To be frank, the private life and the sex life of MPs is not really an issue for the commissioner, and Commissioner Hudson made it very clear that she was not interested in it.

“Commissioner Hudson did not want to know about it. I am not sure why that is relevant, other than me telling you in the interests of transparency.

“I am telling you this because I don’t want to be obstructive of you - you have asked the question - but, actually, I don’t think that is relevant.”

Keith Vaz on late night meetings

The MP told the committee his tight schedule meant he would arrange meetings outside conventional hours.

Committee chair Kate Green: “ Would you find it surprising for painters or decorators to agree to make a visit to discuss a potential commercial contract at 11.30 in the evening?”

Keith Vaz: “No, because evidence has been given to the commissioner from the company that had recommended them.

“This had to start on Monday morning, because we were moving out of our house.

“We have sent the details of the estimates to Commissioner Hudson, and we sent photographs of what had happened to the house.

“As the House was sitting the week after, it had to be done at very short notice.

“I do have meetings with people very late at night. A gardener came to our house and saw us last night at ten o’clock.”

The MP’s co-operation

The committee said Mr Vaz had not co-operated with the parliamentary standard’s commissioner inquiry over the three years it took and ‘thrown dust in her eyes’.

Committee member Tammy Banks: “ I would like to ask you about some of your conduct during the commissioner’s inquiry.

“The commissioner argues that your conduct during her and her predecessors’ inquiry, “suggests to me that he has little or no respect for the standards system.” I wonder how you personally respond to that accusation and to the examples of non-co-operation that she cites.

Keith Vaz: “I disagree with that completely and I think it is unfair.”

Mr Vaz sets out the impact the affair has had on him

The MP has not spoken about the case beyond contesting some of the committee's findings, but here are is opening remarks to them.

“The events on 27 August and 4 September have had a catastrophic effect on my health and my life.

“The delay in dealing with this matter has been intolerable, and it has had a serious detrimental effect on my health.

“I have now served in the House for 32 years. I love this place and would never do anything to harm or damage its reputation or integrity, but we all know politics is a brutal business.

“I have been subjected routinely to horrible abuse by sections of the press, especially when I was Minister for Europe 16 years ago.

“For the press, politicians are fair game.

“We sign up to this when we stand for office.

“But what happened to me crossed the line from legitimate public scrutiny into an attempt to humiliate me personally and publicly, and to destroy my personal and private life and my marriage from within my own home.

“What the newspaper did was to pay people to enter my home and make a covert recording, with the single purpose of publishing a story to damage me personally.

“They then said that they just wanted me out of the chairmanship of the Committee. They appeared not to have done due diligence on those who they paid to do their work.

“These men were not journalists seeking to show that important matters of genuine public interest were being abused.

“They were conmen.

“One was employed as a police interpreter for seven years, handling multiple legal cases, before being arrested by his own police force.

“These were hired hands who made a lot of money for their entrapment from a newspaper group that had to pay out millions to private citizens for breaking the law on phone hacking.

“It had nothing to do with Parliament or parliamentary activities.

“The police informed me that a far-right individual had targeted me because of this article

“I had the vilest racist abuse, and while in public places I was subjected to physical threats because of this article.”