We did not need the verdict of the privileges committee to understand the flaws in Boris Johnson’s character. It was clear long before he became prime minister how manifestly unsuited he was for any kind of public office, let alone running the country. But a cross-party group of MPs last week published a damning report that outlined how he deliberately misled parliament about the scale and nature of wrongdoing in Downing Street during the pandemic. He may now be gone from politics, but the serious questions for the Conservative party – how on earth so many of its MPs were willing to propel him to and sustain him in Number 10 during the worst national crisis in decades – remain hanging over Rishi Sunak’s premiership.
As the privileges committee outlines in its report, for a minister to deliberately deceive the Commons is a matter of great national importance. It undermines the very functioning of parliamentary democracy, whereby the elected legislature is responsible for scrutinising the work of government.
If MPs cannot trust ministers to tell the truth, parliament cannot fulfil its job in holding the executive to account. And it is most serious of all when it is the prime minister – the most senior person in government – seeking to obscure the truth from those to whom he is accountable.
The privileges committee has diligently drawn together the evidence that Johnson knowingly misled parliament about pandemic rule-breaking in No 10. He claimed Covid rules and guidance were followed at all times in Downing Street, when he clearly knew this not to be the case. He failed to disclose his own direct knowledge of when rules and guidance had been broken. He was “deliberately disingenuous” in trying to claim his statements to the Commons meant something other than their plain meaning, and tried to “rewrite the meaning of the rules and guidance to fit his own evidence”. The committee concluded that in doing so he committed a serious contempt of the Commons, that if he had not resigned his seat just over a week ago they would have recommended a significant suspension of 90 days to MPs, and that as an ex-MP he should be denied the privilege of a parliamentary pass.
As bad as the wrongdoing is the way Johnson sought to undermine the work of this committee that was mandated to investigate him by the House of Commons. Despite professing to deprecate claims that the committee was a “kangaroo court” or carrying out a “witch-hunt” in his oral evidence, this is language he liberally deployed once a draft version of the committee’s report was shared with him in confidence. He leaked its contents before publication and impugned the committee, the integrity of its members and the impartiality of its staff without any evidence and accused the committee of “forcing him out… anti-democratically” despite the democratic mandate the committee had to carry out its work and make recommendations to the Commons.
Like former president Donald Trump, this is Johnson seeking to undermine public confidence in the institutions and procedures of democracy for his own ends. It is the dangerous mark of a populist.
But it is entirely in line with what has been his approach to public office and to governing. He has form when it comes to misleading not just MPs but the public: he was one of the architects of the campaign for Brexit that made the case for leaving the EU on the back of a pack of lies; that leaving the EU would free up vast sums for the NHS, and that staying in the EU would lead to imminent borders with Syria and Iraq. He has no respect for official rules designed to ensure probity; the fact that it last week emerged that he did not seek advice from the advisory committee on business appointments before taking a ludicrously high-paid role as a columnist at the Daily Mail is only the latest in a string of wrongdoings in relation to his financial interests. He thinks nothing of damaging the institutions of democracy in his own political interests, such as unlawfully shutting down parliament in order to force through his preferred version of Brexit when he could not get a sufficient number of MPs to back his plans.
But his departure from politics does not close this shameful chapter for the Conservative party. Its MPs indulged him, backed him to be leader and prime minister, and kept him in No 10 long after it became patently clear he was the wrong person to govern in a national emergency. Sunak willingly served him as his chancellor. And so, as much as he might try to distance himself from Johnson in the wake of the committee’s report, he is complicit in the former prime minister’s lies and his attacks on democracy. Sunak’s narrative on migration – where “illegal” immigrants are made into scapegoats for a housing crisis decades in the making, for a lack of school places and record hospital waiting lists that are the result of years of underfunding by Conservative chancellors – is the successor of the populist tactics of Johnson’s leave campaign.
Johnson may have dispatched himself from the Commons, but his dishonourable legacy survives on the Conservative benches. Only a general election – and a Labour government – will allow the country to move on from his toxic brand of politics.
