Former PM launches scathing attack on committee members’ integrity, evidence and conclusions
Boris Johnson has launched an extraordinary fightback as he tries to wrestle back control of the narrative after the privileges committee released its report concluding that he deliberately misled parliament.
A 1,700-word statement from the former prime minister sought to rip apart their findings – impugning the committee’s integrity, evidence and conclusions. This is what he said, scrutinised in closer detail:
It is now many months since people started to warn me about the intentions of the Privileges Committee. They told me that it was a kangaroo court…
They also warned me that most members had already expressed prejudicial views – especially Harriet Harman – in a way that would not be tolerated in a normal legal process.
I knew exactly what events I had attended in No 10. I knew what I had seen, with my own eyes, and like the current PM, I believed that these events were lawful. I believed that my participation was lawful, and required by my job; and that is indeed the implication of the exhaustive police inquiry.
The only exception is the 19 June 2020 event, the so-called birthday party, when I and the then chancellor Rishi Sunak were fined in circumstances that I still find puzzling…
So when on 1 Dec 2021 I told the House of Commons that ‘the guidance was followed completely’ (in No 10) I meant it. It wasn’t just what I thought: it’s what we all thought.
I believed, correctly, that these events were reasonably necessary for work purposes. We were managing a pandemic. We had hundreds of staff engaged in what was sometimes a round-the-clock struggle against Covid. Their morale mattered for that fight. It was important for me to thank them.
If we had genuinely believed these events to be unauthorised – with all the political sensitivities entailed – then there would be some trace in all the thousands of messages sent to me, and to which the committee has had access …
They try, absurdly and incoherently, to say that the assurances of Jack Doyle and [Doyle’s predecessor as communications director] James Slack were not enough to constitute ‘repeated’ assurances – completely and deliberately ignoring the sworn testimony of two MPs, Andrew Griffiths and Sarah Dines, who have also said that they heard me being given such assurances.
Perhaps the craziest assertion of all is the committee’s Mystic Meg claim that I saw the 18 Dec event [where guests were told to bring ‘secret santa’ presents] with my own eyes.
I was wrong to believe in the committee or its good faith… This decision means that no MP is free from vendetta, or expulsion on trumped up charges by a tiny minority who want to see him or her gone from the Commons.
For the privileges committee to use its prerogatives in this anti-democratic way, to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination – that is beneath contempt.
