Boris Johnson condemned for lying to parliament

Report slams former PM’s conduct and says he would have faced a 90-day suspension if he was still an MP

Boris Johnson has been condemned for lying to parliament over the Covid-19 partygate scandal, in a damning report that casts doubt on whether the former prime minister can stage a political comeback.

The 108-page report by MPs on the House of Commons privileges committee, published on Thursday, is a searing indictment of Johnson’s conduct in high office.

The committee said that, if Johnson had not already quit as an MP, he should have been suspended from the Commons for 90 days for “repeated contempt and seeking to undermine the parliamentary process”.

Parties were held in Downing Street and Whitehall during the pandemic — Johnson was himself fined by police for breaking Covid lockdown regulations — but the then-prime minister repeatedly denied to MPs that any rules had been broken.

The report found that he deliberately misled the Commons, lied to the committee, breached confidence, impugned the panel and was complicit in a “campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee”.

Rishi Sunak, prime minister, fears the fallout from the report will reopen rifts in the Conservative party and on Thursday declined to comment on its conclusions. Downing Street refused to say whether he would be at Westminster on Monday when MPs are scheduled to debate whether to approve the findings.

It remains to be seen whether MPs vote on the report or approve it “on the nod”, but Johnson will draw comfort from the fact that some Tory colleagues are prepared to argue he has been badly treated.

There is no precedent for a prime minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House. He misled the House on an issue of the greatest importance to the House and to the public and did so repeatedly

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Privileges Committee report

Sir Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister knighted in Johnson’s resignation honours list, said he was “amazed at the harshness” of the report, saying it was “extraordinary to the point of vindictiveness”.

Johnson himself, who quit as an MP last Friday after receiving a draft of the MPs’ verdict, said he was the victim of a “vendetta” and the report was “intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination”.

New evidence published by the committee on Thursday included a submission from a Downing Street official who said Number 10 was “an island oasis of normality” during the pandemic, with rules set by the government ignored by staffers, who held “wine-time Fridays”.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group said the verdict was “another grim reminder” of how Johnson broke rules “so he could have a party and a laugh” as families “were saying goodbye to loved ones over Zoom”.

“There is no precedent for a prime minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House,” said the committee’s report. “He misled the House on an issue of the greatest importance to the House and to the public, and did so repeatedly.”

In a further blow to Johnson, the cross-party panel also recommended that he should “not be granted a former member’s pass” — restricting his access to the parliamentary estate.

Johnson’s supporters say he could yet make a comeback at Westminster. His spokesman also declined to comment on speculation that he was mulling a run for a third term as mayor of London in 2024, this time as an independent candidate.

Johnson, prime minister from July 2019 until September 2022, was one of Britain’s most controversial leaders in recent times and the most powerful advocate of the Brexit cause.

He took the UK out of the EU in January 2020 but his premiership was quickly engulfed in the coronavirus crisis. The pandemic almost claimed Johnson’s life, but his conduct afterwards was to prove his downfall.

Meanwhile, the privileges committee said it would produce a “special report” on how it was attacked during its probe by MPs sympathetic to Johnson. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dame Andrea Jenkyns both called the seven-member cross-party committee a “kangaroo court”.

The by-election to find a replacement for Johnson as MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip will take place on July 20, as will a separate contest in Selby caused by the resignation of Johnson’s ally Nigel Adams.