If he sincerely believes in integrity in public life, the prime minister must unambiguously endorse the privileges committee’s damning verdict on his predecessor
Let’s conduct a dark thought experiment by imagining that Boris Johnson had successfully blagged and bullied the privileges committee into letting him get away with the repeated lies he told about Partygate. Our democracy would be in a very sickly condition this weekend. The Commons would be in disrepute with the public, a thumping majority of whom concluded long ago that the deceitful scoundrel lied about law-breaking in Downing Street. We would be looking at terrible damage to parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, which vitally depends on upholding the principle that MPs can expect ministers to give them honest information. If such a manifest deceiver had been let off the hook, it would not have taken long for lying to become institutionalised in parliament. So the excoriating judgment of the privileges committee was not just right, it was also imperative.
He greeted their findings with another of his toddler tantrums, screaming about “the final knife-thrust” and “a dreadful day for MPs and for democracy”. To the contrary, this has been one of the brighter moments in the recent history of our democracy. In politics, the media and many other parts of the public square, we are in the midst of a titanic struggle. On the one side are bad actors who seek to advance themselves and their causes by peddling misinformation, mendacity and fakery. Resisting them are those who prize facts, veracity and rules. It was critical that the defenders of integrity in public life prevailed over the forces of darkness.
