Boris Johnson claims there is no document showing that he was given “any warning or advice” than any No 10 event may have broken Covid rules. He says:
It is clear from that investigation that there is no evidence at all that supports an allegation that I intentionally or recklessly misled the house. The only exception is the assertions of the discredited Dominic Cummings, which are not supported by any documentation.
There is not a single document that indicates that I received any warning or advice that any event broke or may have broken the rules or guidance. In fact, the evidence before the committee demonstrates that those working at No 10 at the time shared my honest belief that the rules and guidance were being followed.
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In its report earlier this month, summarising the case against Boris Johnson on the basis partly of No 10 internal messages that had not at that point been made public, the privileges committee said it should have been obvious to Boris Johnson that Covid rules were broken at No 10 events.
In response, Johnson says:
The committee appears to be mounting a case that, despite the absence of any evidence of warnings or advice, it should have been “obvious” to me that the rules and guidance were not being followed, because of the gatherings that I attended. It is important to be frank: this amounts to an allegation that I deliberately lied to parliament.
But it is also an allegation that extends to many others. If it was “obvious” to me that the rules and guidance were not being followed, it would have been equally obvious to dozens of others who also attended the gatherings I did. The vast majority of individuals who have given evidence to the committee and the Cabinet Office investigation have not indicated that they considered that their attendance at the events contravened the rules or the guidance.
The wording of this might be significant. “Have not indicated” they thought events broke the rules is not necessarily the same as “did not think” events broke the rules.
Boris Johnson claims there is no document showing that he was given “any warning or advice” than any No 10 event may have broken Covid rules. He says:
It is clear from that investigation that there is no evidence at all that supports an allegation that I intentionally or recklessly misled the house. The only exception is the assertions of the discredited Dominic Cummings, which are not supported by any documentation.
There is not a single document that indicates that I received any warning or advice that any event broke or may have broken the rules or guidance. In fact, the evidence before the committee demonstrates that those working at No 10 at the time shared my honest belief that the rules and guidance were being followed.
In his statement Boris Johnson does accept that the Commons was misled. He says:
I accept that the House of Commons was misled by my statements that the rules and guidance had been followed completely at No 10. But when the statements were made, they were made in good faith and on the basis of what I honestly knew and believed at the time.
This is not a surprise – it is obvious that MPs were misled – but it is probably helpful to have this on the record from Johnson.
The Commons privileges committee has just published the submission it received from Boris Johnson setting out his response to claims that he deliberately misled MPs over Partygate and that what he said was a contempt of parliament. It’s here.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, will give a statement to MPs at 12.30pm about the Louise Casey review into the Metrolitan police.
You can read the full report here. And here is my colleague Vikram Dodd’s news story about it.
The DUP will not resume power sharing at Stormont yet because it is not willing to “roll over” until its demands for changes to the Northern Ireland protocol are met, Sammy Wilson said this morning.
The DUP MP was speaking on Good Morning Ulster in response to a question from Colum Eastwood, the SDLP leader, who asked Wilson when the DUP would lift its boycott of the power-sharing executive. Without the DUP it cannot function, and the DUP has been refusing to participate for more than a year because of its opposition to the protocol.
In response, Wilson said:
Colum, you may be prepared to roll over, to having powers taken away from the people who are elected to Stormont, we’re not.
At one stage the SDLP and Alliance and other parties, were saying we’ve got to have the full implementation of the protocol because there’s no other game in town.
We insisted that the protocol was not acceptable and that negotiation had to be undertaken to revise it and remove it. We got the negotiation, but we didn’t get the outcome so we have to continue the fight, and we will continue the fight.
The DUP is going to vote against the protocol tomorrow when MPs debate a statutory instrument (SI) implementing one part of it, the Stormont brake.
Eastwood said he could not understand why the DUP did not realise that “the deal is done” and that there is “there is no more negotiating to be done”.
But Eastwood also said the SDLP had yet to decide whether to vote in favour of the SI tomorrow, or to abstain.
Although the party has generally welcomed Windsor framework, the deal to revise the protocol, Eastwood said he thought the Stormont brake – the mechanism intended to enable Stormont to stop some new EU regulations applying in Northern Ireland – was a bad idea. “I think it muddies the water in terms of our investment proposition,” he said.
And here are some other lines from Rishi Sunak’s BBC Breakfast interview.
I’m not going to pre-empt a process that hasn’t concluded.
People can judge me by my actions. In the past when there’s been issues like this, I’ve made sure that they were investigated properly.
I was the one who initiated this investigation. I was the one who appointed a leading independent KC to get to the bottom of it.
Sunak defended the government’s decision to remove the cap on the amount people can save tax-free in their pension pot. Labour says this is a tax cut for the richest 1%, but Sunak said this was about cutting waiting lists. He explained:
This is about cutting waiting lists.
We need our best doctors, our experienced doctors, we need them working, and they want to work, they want to help get the waiting lists down, they want to work longer hours, they don’t want to retire. And because of the pension regime, they were stopped from doing that, it was preventing them from doing that.
And I want to get the waiting list down and that’s why we’ve made the change that we’ve made, and it’s going to benefit everyone to get healthcare quicker.
The Office for Budget Responsibility said the change to pension rules would only increase employment by about 15,000. Other figures suggest the number of doctors incentivised to stay in work could just be in the hundreds. But Sunak insisted that thousands of doctors might be affected, and he said this was about encouraging them to work longer hours, as well as dissuading them from retiring. He said:
There’s thousands of doctors that leave the NHS every year; about two-thirds to three-quarters of them have said that they don’t provide extra hours.
It’s not just about whether they leave or stay; it’s about whether they’re doing the extra shifts, because that’s what’s going to help us get the backlog down.
That’s what we’re trying to do. I don’t think anyone would sit here and say to you that they tolerate any illegal migration. Of course we don’t want to tolerate any illegal migration.
He claimed that Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has been misreported when it was claimed she said flights carrying asylum seekers to Rwanda would start in the summer. They will start when the court process is over, he said.
On BBC Breakfast this morning Rishi Sunak was primarily responding to the Louise Casey report about the Metropolitan police. As my colleague Jamie Grierson reports, he sidestepped a question about whether his daughters could trust the force.
If you want to know why Rishi Sunak refused to engage at all this morning with the question about whether the inquiry by the privileges committee into Boris Johnson is biased or unfair (see 9.18am), a survey of Tory party members by the ConservativeHome website this morning provides the answer. ConHome surveys are a reliable guide to membership opinion, and this one suggests a majority of members (59%) do think the inquiry is unfair, and a significant minority (25%) are committed Johnsonites who want him back as leader before the next election.
The survey also suggests 59% of members do not think Johnson deliberately misled MPs about Partygate, while 30% think he did.
In his write-up, Paul Goodman, the ConHome editor, says:
In sum, a majority of the panel believes he broke lockdown rules, but didn’t deliberately mislead the Commons over breaches in Number Ten; think the Privileges Committee inquiry into his conduct is unfair, and believe that he should be a Tory parliamentary candidate at the next election … but that he shouldn’t return as Conservative leader and Prime Minister (at least before then).
The way I read it, about a quarter of the panel are determined Johnson backers and under a fifth are dedicated Johnson critics – see the last two questions and answers.
As for your average respondent, my sense is that he or she regrets his departure from Downing Street, and feels the accusations against him over Covid and parties are unfair, but doesn’t want him back in Number Ten – for the moment, anyway.
Good morning. Today we are expecting to see the dossier prepared by Boris Johnson intended to show the Commons privileges committee that he did not intentionally mislead MPs about Partygate. Readers with good memories – in fact, readers with any functioning memory at all – will recall that we said much the same yesterday morning. At some point today the forecast should finally come true.
Rishi Sunak has given an interview to BBC Breakfast this morning. He was primarily focusing on Louise Casey’s damning report about the Met, but he was also asked about Johnson. As well as confirming that Tory MPs will get a free vote if the privileges committee recommends sanctions that have to be approved by the Commons as a whole, Sunak also refused to say whether he thought Johnson was the victim of a witch-hunt.
Asked if he agreed with the Johnson supporters who have described the inquiry in those terms, Sunak replied:
That’s ultimately something for Boris Johnson and he’ll have the committee process to go through and that’s a matter for parliament. That’s not what I’m focused on.
Johnson’s diehard supporters continue to argue that the process is biased against him, and that he is being tried by a kangaroo court. They are minority in the parliamentary party, but they are vocal and passionate, and their allies in the media are powerful, mainly because they are the people running papers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.
MPs like Jacob Rees-Mogg have continued to attack the committee even though Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, has warned them not to interfere with the committee’s work. She was more outspoken than Sunak, who this morning sounded anxious to avoid provoking the Johnsonites.
I will post more from his interview soon. Here is my colleague Jessica Elgot’s story.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.
11.30am: The European Research Group, the caucus for hardline Tory Brexiter MPs, hold a press conference to announce its conclusions about the PM’s Northern Ireland protocol deal.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
3pm: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, gives evidence to the Lords economic affairs committee.
I’ll try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com.
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2023-03-21 09:18:00Z
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