Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over lockdown parties: report

London: Former prime minister Boris Johnson called the report into the so-called partygate scandal a “charade” after a parliamentary inquiry concluded he knowingly misled parliament multiple times in his statements about Downing Street gatherings that breached COVID rules.

Johnson has been under investigation by the Commons privileges committee since last June, after a probe by police and then senior civil servant Sue Gray confirmed a series of gatherings had taken place during lockdowns.

Johnson was found to have misled the House of Commons in five different ways in a damning report that casts doubt on whether he can ever stage a political comeback. The seven-member privileges committee said it would have recommended a suspension from parliament for 90 days if Johnson had not resigned as an MP on Friday night.

The committee has recommended that Johnson should not be granted a former Members’ pass that MPs are usually entitled to when they stand down from the House of Commons.

A series of parties were held in Downing Street and Whitehall during the coronavirus pandemic and Johnson was himself fined by police for breaking COVID lockdown regulations. He repeatedly denied to MPs that any rules had been broken.

The MPs on the committee agreed that the former Tory prime minister misled the Commons repeatedly, finding it was not true when he said that guidance was followed completely in Downing Street and that the rules and guidance were followed at all times during the COVID pandemic lockdowns.

It also found he failed to tell the House about his own knowledge of the gatherings where rules or guidance had been broken, and he did not tell the truth when he said that he relied on repeated assurances that the rules had not been broken.

He purported to correct the record but instead continued to mislead the House “and, by his continuing denials, this committee”, the report said.

“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 committee also concluded that Johnson was “complicit” in a “campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee”.

Boris Johnson has labelled the report as a “charade”. Credit: Bloomberg

Johnson, who dramatically quit as an MP on Friday after receiving its draft findings, launched a blistering attack on the committee in his resignation statement, accusing it of “egregious bias” and claiming its MPs were determined to “drive me out of Parliament”.

The UK’s prime minister from July 2019 until September 2022 and a former mayor of London, Johnson was one of Britain’s most controversial leaders in recent times and the most powerful advocate of the Brexit cause. He took Britain out of the EU in January 2020 but his leadership was immediately engulfed in the coronavirus crisis.

He accused the cross-party committee in charge of investigating the breaches of being a “kangaroo court” in his response to the report on Thursday.

He repeatedly targeted committee chairwoman Harriet Harman, accusing her of holding “prejudicial views”, as well as the panel’s most senior Conservative member, Sir Bernard Jenkin.

“The committee is imputing to me and me alone a secret knowledge of illegal events that was somehow not shared by any other official or minister in Number 10. That is utterly incredible. That is the artifice,” he said.

“I was wrong to believe in the committee or its good faith. The terrible truth is that it is not I who has twisted the truth to suit my purposes. It is Harriet Harman and her committee,” he said.

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