Work and pensions secretary Mel Stride urges Tories to move on from Partygate report after abstaining from vote
Good morning. MPs voted last night, by 354 votes to 7, to accept the privileges committee report saying that Boris Johnson deliberately misled them about Partygate, but even though he is now out of parliament, and condemned as a liar in a report actively endorsed by more than half of the Commons, he is still having a corrosive impact on Tory politics. That was illustrated this morning when Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, gave an interview to the Today programme.
Stride said that he accepted the conclusions of the privileges committee report, but that he had doubts about the severity of the notional penalty applied (a 90-day suspension, if Johnson had still been an MP), and so that is why he was one of the 225 Conservatives who did not vote. But it was after that, when the Johnson questions kept coming, that Stride started to struggle.
Stride admitted that he did not know what Rishi Sunak thought about the report. Sunak did not vote yesterday, and Stride defended this, saying the PM was busy. He said:
What I do know is I know that he had some long standing engagements yesterday, including with the Swedish prime minister and the Jewish Care event in the evening.
Stride refused to say that he thought it would be unacceptable to return as a Conservative MP. He said he wanted the party to move on:
I think really the caravan has got to move on from Boris Johnson, with respect.
I can’t read the future. And I don’t think it’s right for me to come on your programme and start speculating on the future.
I’m not going to be drawn in speculating on the future of Boris Johnson.
Stride failed to defend Johnson’s resignation honours list in its entirety, suggesting that it might be right for Shaun Bailey, the former Tory mayoral candidate, to refuse his peerage. Bailey’s peerage is in jeopardy because, just a week after it announced, the Mirror released a video of a Tory “jingle and mingle” party he attended that is being investigated by the police as a potential breach of lockdown rules. It was organised by Bailey’s campaign team. Asked if he agreed that Bailey’s peerage was in question, Stride said he did not want to prejudge the investigation. Asked if Bailey definitely would become a peer, Stride declined to say. Asked if he accepted that the Johnson honours list had not been good for the party, Stride said:
I think its down to Boris Johnson who he put forward.
