There is a “witch hunt” trying to reverse Brexit by personally destroying Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister said as he announced his immediate withdrawal from the House of Commons.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson made serious allegations about the impartiality and intentions of those leading an investigation against him, and took shots at the poor leadership of his successor Rishi Sunak in a letter announcing his immediate resignation from Britain’s Parliament Friday.
“I am now being forced out of parliament by a tiny handful of people, with no evidence to back up their assertions”, Johnson said, remarking he was leaving Parliament “for now”.
Johnson has been the subject of an investigation by the Privileges Committee of the House of Commons which, it is claimed, has found he misled Parliament and recommended he be excluded from the House for ten days. Rather than accept that punishment, Johnson has insisted his is innocent of the charge of misleading the house and resigned instead on, he says, a point of principle.
Saying the intent of the Committee investigating him was not maintaining discipline in the house but actually to enact a vendetta against him over political differences, Johnson wrote: “they have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth because from the outset their purpose has not been to discover the truth… Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.”
Johnson said members of the committee including the chair, veteran left-wing politician Harriet Harman, had made “deeply prejudicial remarks about my guilt” and that a theoretically politically neutral civil servant who investigated him had subsequently gone on to take a senior position in the Labour party.
This “witch hunt” was underway, Johnson claimed, because some wanted to “take revenge” for him delivering on the 2016 Brexit referendum, and to reverse the result with a “political hitjob” against him.
Also in Johnson’s sights — if slightly less forthrightly — was his successor Rishi Sunak, who he pointed out was considerably behind where Johnson had been in the polls in recent memory. Making references to his historic 2019 general election win, Johnson said the Conservative Party needed to cut taxes and get back its “mojo” in order to win power again.
Making reference to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s uneventful trip to Washington D.C. this week where he said he wasn’t even going to bother bringing up a UK-U.S. free trade deal, Johnson decried the idea having been “passively abandoned”.
Boris Johnson was forced out of power in July 2022 after questions arose over his handling of the Coronavirus lockdown. Chief among them were claims that he had broken his own lockdown rules to hold social work events in his government offices, something that was banned in the country otherwise at the time.
While he has sniped at Sunak for failing to make the most of the promise of Brexit in his letter today, Johnson is easily guilty of the same himself, with no free trade deal signed during his time in office, nor tax cuts made, nor immigration system fixed.