The Privileges Committee has today published its findings on whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Partygate. The House of Commons voted for such an inquiry, fourteen months ago: its members now have a 100-page, 30,000 word report to trawl through. It makes for damning reading. It finds that Johnson committed multiple contempts of parliament, including deliberately misleading the House, breaching confidence and ‘being complicit in the attempted intimidation of the committee’.
They conclude that ‘there is no precedent for a Prime Minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House’ and therefore recommend a 90-day suspension for him: one of the longest in parliamentary history. An attempt to expel him from the House – a far more serious sanction which would have forced an immediate by-election – was defeated after the four Tories on the seven man panel voted against it. But in an added humiliation, the committee recommend that Johnson lose his former members’ pass: a fate previously suffered by John Bercow.
Below are three things we learned from the mammoth report.
Johnson’s reaction increased his punishment
Boris Johnson pre-emptively quit the Commons on Friday after seeing the committee’s conclusions. But it would be a mistake to dismiss this report as having been overtaken by the events of last week. As the committee make clear, Johnson’s decision to stand down and attack the committee before the report’s publication led to a last-minute update in its conclusions.
‘Mr Johnson’s conduct in making this statement is in itself a very serious contempt’ they find. ‘This was done before the committee had come to its final conclusions, at a time when Mr Johnson knew the committee would not be in a position to respond publicly.’ We don’t know what kind of suspension they were thinking about but the 90-day figure is much higher than the 20-days or so previously being floated in the press.
Johnson’s ‘insincere’ defence of the committee
During his evidence session of 22 March, Boris Johnson praised the ‘distinguished’ members of the committee and that he ‘deprecates’ the use of the term ‘kangaroo court’ with reference to the panel. Johnson subsequently wrote to Sir Charles Walker on 30 March and lavished further praise on the committee. In this letter, published today, he expressed his concern that ‘at the end of what had been a long hearing, I was not emphatic enough in the answers that I provided’ insisting that ‘I have the utmost respect for the integrity of the committee and all its members and the work that it is doing.’
But ten weeks weeks later, when presented with the panel’s report, Johnson broke the confidentiality agreement, quit as an MP and declared ‘Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.’ The committee therefore concluded that ‘this leaves us in no doubt that he was insincere in his attempts to distance himself from the campaign of abuse and intimidation of committee members.’
Like Sue Gray’s inquiry before it, the Privileges Committee probe posed a quandary for Johnson and his supporters. Should they gamely go along with the process and accept its findings graciously? Or should they dismiss it as biased from the start, a stitch-up, a witch-hunt and one without due process? Johnson’s answer was a ‘cakeist’ approach: welcoming favourable developments and rejecting the less favourable. He therefore was willing to go along with the ‘distinguished’ committee – right up until the point when it ruled against him.
Johnson ‘closed his mind to the truth’
The contrast between this report and Johnson’s own 1,679-word response is like night and day: he is defiant, unrepentant and refuses to accept their findings. It’s the same approach he has demonstrated throughout this whole process and the frustration and irritation of MPs at his protestations is clear throughout this report. Johnson told the House that ‘all guidance was followed’ during Covid: the MPs therefore had to examine if this was the case. They looked at six events at which Covid rules were alleged to have been broken; the MPs claim that any ‘reasonable’ person would agree that they were.
Johnson though disagrees. He focuses on things like the assurances given to him by aides, even though, as the committee points out, such assurances refer to one specific event rather than all events. The committee therefore accuses him of making ‘denials and explanations so disingenuous that they were by their very nature deliberate attempts to mislead the Committee and the House’. They say this amounted to effectively having ‘closed his mind to the truth.’
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