The Privileges Committee report into Boris Johnson has been published. At last, after months of speculation—and the recent political chaos prompted by Johnson’s pre-emptive resignation of his seat—we can assess its contents. So what is the committee’s verdict on the former prime minister’s assurances over Partygate? Here are some reflections.
The report is as bad as it can be for Johnson
Johnson is found to have committed multiple contempts of parliament by deliberately misleading the House of Commons and the committee itself. His belligerent response to the committee’s draft report has made matters much worse. By impugning the work of the committee he is guilty of “undermining the democratic process of the House”. His deliberate misleading is “all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government. There is no precedent for a Prime Minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House”.
The committee recommends the extraordinary sanction of suspension from the House for 90 days, and denial of a former member’s parliamentary pass.
The report is unanimous: indeed two members, Allan Dorans and Yvonne Fovargue, would have gone even further and expelled Johnson from the House.
A reminder: the committee is not a court
It is a fundamental feature of the constitution that parliament regulates its own affairs—not a court or any other external body (see Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689). The parliamentary process is essentially political, rather than legal. Members of the committee are politicians, not judges. It goes with the territory that some of them (like the chair, Harriet Harman) may have previously said some things publicly about the subject matter of the inquiry, in ways which no judge would have done.
Nonetheless the committee has taken a thorough, forensic approach to its task. Line by line, event by event, statement by statement, it analyses the evidence about what happened in Downing Street, what Johnson knew about it, and what he said to parliament. The committee provided Johnson with all the evidence in unredacted, unanonymised form. It gave him the opportunity to give evidence, in writing and orally, and to make representations about its draft report (which he did—see above). It took legal and procedural advice from senior experts.
The allegation that the committee moved the goalposts to Johnson’s disadvantage by extending its remit to include the reckless misleading of parliament turns out to be academic: it finds he (repeatedly) did so deliberately.
Johnson didn’t have to resign
The committee’s report is only a recommendation to the House of Commons. The committee itself can’t suspend the former prime minister or impose any other penalty. Johnson may argue that he jumped before he was pushed. But for him to be “pushed” out of parliament would have required a vote of the whole House agreeing that he be suspended for at least 10 days, and a recall petition in his constituency signed by at least 10 per cent of the electorate. Even then he could (if he had wanted) have tried to clamber back up by standing in the resulting byelection. It was Johnson’s decision not to pursue that course.
Johnson has accepted the report with his customary dignity
Even before the committee reported, Johnson described it as a “kangaroo court” engaged in a “witch hunt” and following an “absurd and unjust process”. The committee concludes that he was “insincere in his attempts to distance himself from the campaign of abuse and intimidation of committee members”. This amounted to a further contempt.
Johnson’s reaction to the final report is similarly measured. He describes it as “rubbish”, “a lie”, “deranged”, “patently absurd”, “transparently wrong”, “a load of complete tripe”, “a charade” and “beneath contempt”.
This is not, to put it mildly, the language of a merely disappointed litigant who nonetheless accepts the jurisdiction of the court.
What happens now?
The House of Commons is due to hold a debate on the report on 19th June, to decide whether they agree with its conclusions. It is expected to be a free vote, though the specific motion to be put to the House has not yet been published. In one sense the debate is superseded by the fact that Johnson has resigned. But it will show whether the House as a whole is prepared to endorse the role of the Privileges Committee, and whether it shares the committee’s conclusions about the seriousness of its findings and their implications for democracy and the work of parliament.
Conceivably this will not be the end of the story. The report comments that on 18th May the government provided the committee with “new evidence relating to 16 gatherings at No 10 and at Chequers”. In order to avoid further delay, the committee has accepted Johnson’s evidence that the gatherings were all lawful as “prima facie true”. But “if for any reasons it subsequently emerges that Mr Johnson’s explanations are not true, then he may have committed a further contempt”. The committee has also said it intends to produce a special report dealing with attempts to “undermine the Committee’s credibility and, more worryingly, that of those Members serving on it”. So more adverse findings might follow.
In any event, the tone and outcome of the debate on 19th June will surely be crucial in determining whether Johnson is merely temporarily disgraced, or finished for good.
Wider lessons
The report contains wider messages about the vital importance of ministers being honest to parliament, and promptly correcting any inadvertent mistakes. “If Ministers cannot be trusted to tell the truth, the House cannot do its job and the confidence of the public in our democracy is undermined”. Any minister tempted in future to play fast and loose with their duty to parliament would be wise to take that lesson to heart: no one will want to go through the kind of scrutiny which the Privileges Committee has subjected Johnson to.
