Boris Johnson misled UK Parliament over Partygate scandal, panel rules

The highly anticipated report from the House of Commons Privileges Committee found that his actions violated the rules and that they warranted a 90-day suspension from parliament, before he decided to quit.

The committee published a summary in which it clearly states the reasoning behind the verdict:

“We considered the nature and extent of Mr Johnson’s culpability in misleading the house. In coming to the conclusion that Mr Johnson deliberately misled the house, we considered:

• His repeated and continuing denials of the facts, for example his refusal to accept that there were insufficient efforts to enforce social distancing at gatherings where a lack of social distancing is documented in official photographs, and that he neither saw nor heard anything to alert him to the breaches that occurred.
• The frequency with which he closed his mind to those facts and to what was obvious so that eventually the only conclusion that could be drawn was that he was deliberately closing his mind.
• The fact that he sought to rewrite the meaning of the rules and guidance to fit his own evidence, for example, his assertion that “imperfect” social distancing was perfectly acceptable when there were no mitigations in place rather than cancelling a gathering or holding it online, and his assertion that a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering.
• His own after-the-event rationalisations, for example the nature and extent of the assurances he received, the words used, the purpose of the assurances, who they came from, the warning he received about that from Martin Reynolds (his principal private secretary) and his failure to take advice from others whose advice would have been authoritative. His view about his own fixed-penalty notice (that he was baffled as to why he received it) is instructive.

We came to the view that some of Mr Johnson’s denials and explanations were so disingenuous that they were by their very nature deliberate attempts to mislead the Committee and the house, while others demonstrated deliberation because of the frequency with which he closed his mind to the truth.”

The panel also said that Johnson would be facing a 90-day suspension if he was still an MP.

Following the announcement, Johnson published a 1,700-word rebuttal to the panel in which he expressed that the report was a “charade,” claiming that he is a victim of “protracted political assassination.”

Johnson wrote:

“I believed that we were working, and we were: talking for the main about nothing except work, mainly covid. Why would I have set out, in the Chamber, to conceal my knowledge of something illicit, if that account could be so readily contradicted by others? Why would we have had an official photographer if we believed we were breaking the law?

“We didn’t believe that what we were doing was wrong, and after a year of work the Privileges Committee has found not a shred of evidence that we did.

“Their argument can be boiled down to: ‘Look at this picture – that’s Boris Johnson with a glass in his hand. He must have known that the event was illegal. Therefore he lied.”

Last week, Johnson described the committee as a “kangaroo court” conducting a “witch hunt” to drive him out of Parliament. Some of the panel’s members come from the Conservative Party.

The report is the latest development in the infamous Partygate scandal. Local news at the time revealed that members of then-Prime Minister Johnson’s staff held a number of parties in 2020 and 2021, during the peak of the pandemic in the UK when such gatherings were strictly prohibited due to COVID curbs.