Bishop of Buckingham joins calls for Boris
Johnson to resign
Alan Wilson calls PM’s self-defence ‘nonsense’ and
says country needs leader it can trust
Nadeem
Badshah
Fri 3 Jun
2022 22.16 BST
The bishop
of Buckingham has joined the growing calls for Boris Johnson to resign and
believes that he “obviously” lied over lockdown parties in Downing Street.
The Right
Rev Dr Alan Wilson described the prime minister’s defence that he did not
realise what was going on as “nonsense”, adding that the country needed a
leader it could trust.
Johnson has
faced public calls from Conservative MPs to stand down following the final
report by Sue Gray into breaches of Covid regulations and the alcohol culture
in Downing Street and Whitehall.
Under party
rules, he will face a confidence vote if 54 Tory MPs, 15% of the party, submit
a letter to the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee Sir Graham Brady calling
for one.
Asked on
Times Radio if Johnson should resign, Wilson said: “The only answer is yes. I’m
an army baby and what they used to say in the army was you can trust anybody,
but you can’t trust a liar.”
He added:
“You can see it from a mile off. And most ordinary people realise it’s all
nonsense. It’s not the parties actually. It’s the lying. I think that’s the
problem. I mean, everybody makes mistakes. And I think people are very tolerant
about that. But I think it’s very difficult to trust a liar.”
The number
of Conservative MPs publicly criticising Johnson’s conduct has convinced some
in Westminster that the threshold of 54 letters could be met next week.
Some MPs
are known to be holding back from submitting letters of no confidence over
concerns that their names will leak and they will face reprisals from the
whips.
Simon Fell,
the MP for Barrow, became the latest backbencher to publicly question the prime
minister’s position on Wednesday, saying an apology was “insufficient” in a
letter to constituents.
Meanwhile,
Jonathan Evans, the chair of the committee on standards in public life, accused
Johnson of failing to allay fears that he and his ministers consider themselves
above the rules.
He also
criticised a planned overhaul to the way the ministerial code is policed,
saying they undermined the role of the Tory leader’s ethics adviser,
Christopher Geidt.
Johnson
still faces an investigation by the House of Commons privileges committee over
whether he lied to MPs when repeatedly asserting that “all guidance was
followed” in Downing Street.
Despite the
changes to the ministerial code, the penalty for misleading parliament remains
resignation.
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