A report by MPs says ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson deliberately misled the Commons over lockdown parties at 10 Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic. The privileges committee report concluded it would have recommended suspending Johnson from the House for 90 days had he not already stood down as an MP.
The report found he deliberately misled the House of Commons and the committee investigating him while he also impugned the committee and was “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee". Though his resignation means he will escape that punishment the committee recommended that he should not receive the pass granting access to Parliament which is normally given to former MPs. Mr Johnson hit out at what he called a "deranged conclusion", accusing the Tory-majority group of MPs he has repeatedly sought to disparage of lying.
Outlined in the report are the five key ways they say he misled the house:
- When he said that guidance was followed completely in No 10, that the rules and guidance were followed at all times, that events in No 10 were within the rules and guidance, and that the rules and guidance had been followed at all times when he was present at gatherings.
- When he failed to tell the house about his own knowledge of the gatherings where rules or guidance had been broken.
- When he said that he relied on repeated assurances that the rules had not been broken. The assurances he received were not accurately represented by him to the house nor were they appropriate to be cited to the house as an authoritative indication of No 10’s compliance with Covid restrictions.
- When he gave the impression that there needed to be an investigation by Sue Gray before he could answer questions when he had personal knowledge that he did not reveal.
- When he purported to correct the record but instead continued to mislead the house and, by his continuing denials, the committee.
BBC chief political correspondent Nick Eardley said the findings were "considerably worse than many expected" and described it as being as damning as it could have been. The Liberal Democrats have called for him to be stripped of the £115,000 annual allowance available to former prime ministers to run their office. Deputy Lib Dem leader Daisy Cooper said: "This damning report should be the final nail in the coffin for Boris Johnson's political career. It is completely unprecedented for a former Prime Minister to be found to have been a law-breaker and serial liar who treated the public and Parliament with total disdain.
"Rishi Sunak must cut off Johnson's ex-Prime Minister allowance to stop him milking the public purse for his own personal gain. Anything less would be an insult to bereaved families who suffered while Boris Johnson lied and partied."
The report also found that Mr Johnson was "deliberately disingenuous when he tried to reinterpret his statements to the house to avoid their plain meaning and reframe the clear impression that he intended to give". The report also says that in coming to the conclusion they considered:
- a) His repeated and continuing denials of the facts, for example his refusal to accept that there were insufficient efforts to enforce social distancing at gatherings where a lack of social distancing is documented in official photographs, and that he neither saw nor heard anything to alert him to the breaches that occurred.
- b) The frequency with which he closed his mind to those facts and to what was obvious so that eventually the only conclusion that could be drawn was that he was deliberately closing his mind.
- c) The fact that he sought to rewrite the meaning of the rules and guidance to fit his own evidence, for example his assertion that “imperfect” social distancing was perfectly acceptable when there were no mitigations in place rather than cancelling a gathering or holding it online, and his assertion that a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering.
- d) His own after-the-event rationalisations, for example the nature and extent of the assurances he received, the words used, the purpose of the assurances, who they came from, the warning he received about that from Martin Reynolds (his principal private secretary,) and his failure to take advice from others whose advice would have been authoritative. His view about his own fixed-penalty notice (that he was baffled as to why he received it) is instructive.
It concluded: "We came to the view that some of Mr Johnson’s denials and explanations were so disingenuous that they were by their very nature deliberate attempts to mislead the committee and the house while others demonstrated deliberation because of the frequency with which he closed his mind to the truth." In reply Mr Johnson issued a 1,700-word rebuttal in which he angrily rejected what the committee said. You can read his words in full here.
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