The UK Parliament’s Privileges Committee publishes its report on Boris Johnson, stating it believes he deliberately misled the House over ‘Partygate’, a claim the former PM continues to deny, decrying the “kangaroo court” and “political assassination” against him.
Boris Johnson would be suspended from Parliament for 90 days for misleading members, the House Privileges Committee has ruled, a serious punishment that would be served had former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson not already resigned from Parliament last week. Instead, the Committee recommended Johnson not be allowed to hold a former member’s pass for the House of Commons.
The report stems from comments made by Johnson when he was Prime Minister about gatherings held at his official office and residence in Downing Street in 2020 and 2021. Standing accused of breaking the very Coronavirus lockdown rules he and his government had devised and forced on the British public, Johnson insisted that he had followed all rules and the gatherings had been legal. It was later ruled they had not been, prompting Johnson to stand down as Prime Minister in 2022.
He has maintained since that he did not consciously mislead parliament, and that what he told members were actually honest mistakes.
Since that, Johnson has said that while he initially trusted the processes around the investigations into parties at Downing Street and his comments on them, he claims to have subsequently discovered they are not neutral arbiters of the truth but rather politically motivated. In his response to the report today, Johnson wrote:
It is now many months since people started to warn me about the intentions of the Privileges Committee. They told me that it was a kangaroo court. They told me that it was being driven relentlessly by the political agenda of Harriet Harman, and supplied with skewed legal advice – with the sole political objective of finding me guilty and expelling me from parliament.
They also warned me that most members had already expressed prejudicial views – especially Harriet Harman – in a way that would not be tolerated in a normal legal process… This report is a charade. I was wrong to believe in the Committee or its good faith. The terrible truth is that it is not I who has twisted the truth to suit my purposes. It is Harriet Harman and her Committee.
Harriet Harman is a veteran of the last Labour government and now is the Privileges Committee chair.
Johnson warned the attack, which he has characterised as a “political assassination” against him was a “dreadful day for MPs and for democracy” and opened a precedent for “vendetta” by committees against politicians in future. Johnson accuses the findings of contravening the findings of the police themselves, who cleared Johnson of lawbreaking in their investigation.
While Johnson’s allies have rallied to his cause, others have met with pleasure the report finding that Johnson misled Parliament. The BBC’s analysis has called the findings a “brutal demolition” of Johnson’s defence. In terms of history, their correspondent says: “If you think about the several hundred year history of parliament, there’s nothing like this”.
As for the report itself, it found that Johnson sought to “undermine the parliamentary process” by deliberately misleading the House and the Committee, breached confidence, impugned the Committee — “thereby undermining the democratic process of the House” — and being complicit in a campaign of “abuse and attempted intimidation”.
Johnson ally Jacob Rees-Mogg MP said in response to the ruling in an interview with GB News that because Johnson was no longer in Parliament the theoretical 90-day ban handed out by the committee was “otiose” and only “trying to make a point”. The politician also pointed out that the Committee had failed to address accusations that its members came to the investigation having already made their own minds up.
On the other hand, The Guardian cites the Labour response to the findings, which called them “damning”, and repeating the statement that “Boris Johnson is a lawbreaker and a liar”.
While some recognise even this fall from grace won’t have totally tarnished Johnson’s star power — Brexit leader Nigel Farage has floated the idea of an electoral alliance with Boris to take on the globalist managerial clique who have captured Downing Street — that doesn’t mask the fact his time in power was nowhere near as conservative as promised. Quite apart from the draconian lockdowns, which as today’s findings remind us even the man who wrote them found to be incomprehensible and impossible to faithfully follow, Johnson’s leadership was also marked by high levels of immigration, taxation, and debt.