Former British prime minister Boris Johnson deliberately and repeatedly misled Parliament when he denied knowledge of Covid-19 law-breaching parties in Downing Street, a cross-party parliamentary panel said on Thursday in its damning report into the Partygate scandal.
The Commons Privileges Committee released its final report into the Partygate scandal days after Johnson, 58, resigned from Parliament as a MP, accusing the members of the committee of a “witch hunt” against him.
Finding him in breach of the Commons rules, the committee was also highly critical of his attacks on its integrity and recommended a suspension of 90 days from Parliament had he not resigned.
We have concluded above that in deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government,” the Privileges Committee report said, in a historic admonishment of a former premier. “Although Mr Johnson’s resignation as an MP renders it impossible for a sanction of suspension to be imposed, we draw attention to the fact that before the events of Friday 9 June we had provisionally agreed to recommend a suspension long enough to engage the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act,” it says, with reference to Johnson’s resignation.
The committee notes that there is no precedent for a British Prime Minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House of Commons and also that Johnson misled it on an issue of the “greatest importance to the House and to the public, and did so repeatedly”.
They accuse Johnson of committing further contempt in his attacks on the due parliamentary process with deprecated terms such as “witch hunt” and “kangaroo court”.
“We put on record that if he had not resigned his seat, we would have recommended that he be suspended from the service of the House for 90 days for repeated contempts and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process, by – Deliberately misleading the House; Deliberately misleading the Committee; Breaching confidence; Impugning the Committee and thereby undermining the democratic process of the House; Being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the Committee,” the report concludes. In light of Johnson’s resignation as an MP, the committee has recommended that he should not be granted a former member’s pass - which would have allowed him limited access to Parliament, including for lunches and to see former colleagues.