4m ago
09.48 BST
Johnson says report is 'charade', and claims he
is victim of 'protracted political assassination'
Boris Johnson has issued a 1,700-word rebuttal to the
committee. It reads more like a Telegraph column, than a legal document, and it
amounts to a wholesale, and bitterly angry, rejection of what the committee is
saying. Here are some of the key points.
Johnson says the report is “a charade”, and that some
of its arguments are “a load of complete tripe”. He says:
I believed that we were working, and we were:
talking for the main about nothing except work, mainly covid. Why would I have
set out, in the Chamber, to conceal my knowledge of something illicit, if that
account could be so readily contradicted by others? Why would we have had an
official photographer if we believed we were breaking the law?
We didn’t believe that what we were doing was
wrong, and after a year of work the Privileges Committee has found not a shred
of evidence that we did.
Their argument can be boiled down to: ‘Look at
this picture – that’s Boris Johnson with a glass in his hand. He must have
known that the event was illegal. Therefore he lied.”
That is a load of complete tripe. That picture
was me, in my place of work, trying to encourage and thank my officials in a
way that I believed was crucial for the government and for the country as a
whole, and in a way which I believed to be wholly within the rules …
This report is a charade. 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 says that the publication of the report is “a
dreadful day for democracy” and that it is part of a “protracted political
assassination”. He says:
This is a dreadful day for MPs and for democracy.
This decision means that no MP is free from vendetta, or expulsion on trumped
up charges by a tiny minority who want to see him or her gone from the Commons.
I do not have the slightest contempt for
parliament, or for the important work that should be done by the Privileges
Committee.
But for the Privileges Committee to use its
prerogatives in this anti-democratic way, to bring about what is intended to be
the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination – that is
beneath contempt.
He says that he genuinely believed that leaving
events he attended at Downing Street were justified under the Covid rules. The
committee says he ignored the fact that social distancing rules were not being
followed, and that, when he claimed in-person leaving dos were allowed at the
time, he was in effect rewriting the rules after the event. (See 9.13am.)
Johnson claims this is wrong. He says:
I knew exactly what events I had attended in
Number 10. I knew what I had seen, with my own eyes, and like the current PM, I
believed that these events were lawful. I believed that my participation was
lawful, and required by my job; and that is indeed the implication of the exhaustive
police inquiry.
The only exception is the June 19 2020 event, the
so-called birthday party, when I and the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak were fined
in circumstances that I still find puzzling (I had lunch at my desk with people
I worked with every day).
So when on Dec 1 2021 I told the House of Commons
that “the guidance was followed completely” (in Number Ten) I meant it. It
wasn’t just what I thought: it’s what we all thought – that we were following
the rules and following the guidance completely – notwithstanding the
difficulties of maintaining social distancing at all times.
The committee now says that I deliberately misled
the House, and at the moment I spoke I was consciously concealing from the
House my knowledge of illicit events.
This is rubbish. It is a lie. In order to reach
this deranged conclusion, the Committee is obliged to say a series of things
that are patently absurd, or contradicted by the facts.
He defends his belief that in-person work leaving dos
were allowed during lockdown. He says:
They say that I must have known that the farewell
events I attended were not authorised workplace events because – wait for it –
NO SUCH EVENT could lawfully have taken place, anywhere in this country, under
the Committee’s interpretation of covid rules. This is transparently wrong. I
believed, correctly, that these events were reasonably necessary for work
purposes. We were managing a pandemic. We had hundreds of staff engaged in what
was sometimes a round-the-clock struggle against covid. Their morale mattered
for that fight. It was important for me to thank them.
He accuses Sir Bernard Jenkin of rank hypocrisy. He
says:
The Committee cannot possibly believe the
conclusions of their own report – because it has now emerged that Sir Bernard
Jenkin attended at least one “birthday event”, on Dec 8 2020 – the birthday of
his wife Anne – when it is alleged that alcohol and food were served and the
numbers exceeded six indoors.
Why was it illegal for me to thank staff and
legal for Sir Bernard to attend his wife’s birthday party?
The hypocrisy is rank. Like Harriet Harman, he
should have recused himself from the inquiry, since he is plainly conflicted.
He dismisses the committee’s suggestion that he
must have known a party took place in the No 10 press office on 18 December
2020 because he walked past it. See paragraph 83, on page 28 of the report.
Commenting on it, Johnson says:
Perhaps the craziest assertion of all is the
Committee’s Mystic Meg claim that I saw the Dec 18 event with my own eyes. They
say, without any evidence whatever, that at 21.58pm, on that date, my eyes for
one crucial second glanced over to the media room as I went up to the flat –
and that I saw what I recognised as an unauthorised event in progress …
First, the Committee has totally ignored the
general testimony about that evening, which is that people were working
throughout, even if some had been drinking at their desks. How on earth do
these clairvoyants know exactly what was going on at 21.58 …
It is a measure of the Committee’s desperation
that they are trying incompetently and absurdly to tie me to an illicit event –
with an argument so threadbare that it belongs in one of Bernard Jenkin’s
nudist colonies.
Their argument is that I saw this event, believed
it to be illegal, and had it in my head when I spoke to the House. On all three
counts they are talking out of the backs of their necks. If I did see an
illegal event, and register it as illegal, then why was I on my own in this?
Why not the Cabinet Secretary, or Sue Gray, or the then Chancellor, who was
patrolling the same corridors at the time?
Jenkin is, or in the past used to be, a naturist.
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