A newlywed whose husband died of Covid three weeks after their wedding has blasted Boris Johnson after a report found he deliberately misled Parliament with his partygate denials.
Yesterday, the disgraced former Prime Minister's litany of lies caught up with him as the Privileges Committee also accused him of being “complicit” in a campaign to intimidate its members who were tasked with investigating him.
And it said Johnson continued with his lies even as MPs grilled him on them and then breached Commons rules by leaking the damning report’s findings before they were published.
The 106-page paper exposes as hollow his claims that “all guidance was followed in No10” during 2020’s illegal lockdown parties, first revealed by the Mirror in December 2021.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice (CBFFJ) UK campaign group said Mr Johnson “should never be allowed to stand for any form of public office again”.
Fran Hall, one of the volunteers who lovingly paints hearts every Friday at the Covid Memorial Wall, said there was “no happiness” at the report’s findings.
She added that Mr Johnson is a “disgraced former prime minister”, which she said was now “plain and evident to see”.
Her husband Steve Mead died three weeks after they got married in 2020.
She said: “There are so many people who are just traumatised by what’s happened to them and the people they love.
“They will never recover and there will be no justice.
“They’ve just got to live with the knowledge that they have been absolutely let down by the people that were in charge of ensuring that we were kept safe, and we weren’t.
“It will always sting but we had the worst possible prime minister at the worst possible time and he was surrounded by people that enabled him to continue to lie to everyone. I feel empty, really.”
Ms Hall was one of the five members from CBFFJ who were invited to Downing Street to meet the then-prime minister in September 2021.
She said: “We knew at that point that he was not telling us the truth when he looked at us and said that he was doing everything he could to prevent other people having to go through what we’d been through.
“We knew that he was lying and it’s now apparent that he’s lied to Parliament and to the whole country.”
On what the response should be to the findings, she said: “I don’t think he should be seen in public in the role of a former prime minister.
“He’s a disgraced former prime minister and that is now plain and evident.”
The Covid Memorial wall sits opposite the Houses of Parliament to preserve the memory of those we lost to the pandemic.
Volunteers travel as far as 140 miles each week to take care of the 500-metre-long wall that is dotted with more than 200,000 red hearts - each representing someone who fell victim to Covid-19.
David Garfinkel, spokesperson for CBFFJ, said Mr Johnson had shown “no remorse” and instead “lied to our faces”.
Mr Garfinkel said: “This is another grim reminder that whilst families like mine were saying goodbye to our loved ones over Zoom, the same prime minister that failed us so badly in the first place was breaking his own rules so he could have a party and a laugh.
“Johnson has shown no remorse. Instead he lied to our faces when he told us that he’d done ‘all he could’ to protect our loved ones.
“He lied again when he said the rules hadn’t been broken in Number 10, and he’s lied ever since when he’s denied it again and again.
“It’s an utter tragedy that Johnson was in charge when the pandemic struck and he should never be allowed to stand for any form of public office again.
“His fall from grace must serve as a lesson to other politicians to act with honesty and to serve the public as a whole – that is the only positive that can come from this.”
