The PM did not lie to the House of Commons. Now, ordinarily what goes on inside the House of Commons is not for lawyers like me to adjudicate. The 1688 Bill of Rights says ‘Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court’. So normally I would stay silent.
But we are facing a very interesting constitutional crisis. Because whether someone lies is really a legal question. It has a test as law. A lie is defined in the dictionary as a factual statement that is untrue and made with intent to deceive. In the leading case of R v Lucas [1981] Q.B. 720 the courts found a lie must be ‘deliberate’. The PM could not possibly have lied by telling the house that he believed the Covid laws were followed – not unless he deliberately knew the law was against him. There is no way he fulfils the legal test – because no one knows today if the law is actually against him.
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