Author: Chris Kodo

When questioned about the Partygate affair, Boris Johnson lost his cool and yelled at the chairman of the committee, telling him that “those who allege that we were partying in lockdown just do not know what they are talking about.”

The Parliamentary Privileges Committee has previously questioned the former prime minister for a number of hours.

Although Mr. Johnson acknowledges deceiving Lawmakers, he will argue that he ‘didn’t mean to.’

In a 52-page paper turned in on Monday, he said that what he did at the time was what he considered to be correct. He is fighting to save his political career.

He was greeted with cheers as he arrived in parliament, before taking a seat alongside other MPs in front of the committee.

He was shown footage of his own words, as he spoke to MPs on multiple occasions during the pandemic and said time and time again there was ‘no party’ in Downing Street.

Privileges Committee chairwoman Harriet Harman set out what Boris will be questioned about and said they would be talking about the ‘rules and guidance’ around his breaches, and that he said he complied with both.

Former PM snaps at people accusing government of “partying” in lockdown

She said: ‘In our report of the 3rd of March we set out the main issues which we will be asking Mr Johnson about today.

‘We will be talking about rules and guidance since Mr Johnson told the house No 10 complied with both.

‘When we refer to rules we mean regulations laid down by the house which have the force of law and under which fixed penalty notices were issued.

‘Guidance is guidance issued by the government, for example when Mr Johnson was talking about ‘hands face space’, he was referring to the guidance on social distancing when he said space.

‘On the basis of information that is in the public domain and evidence the committee has received and in the context of what Mr Johnson said to the House of Commons, we will be establishing what rules and guidance relating to Covid were enforced at the relevant time, Mr Johnson’s knowledge of those rules and guidance, Mr Johnson’s attendance at or knowledge of gatherings that were not socially distanced and those for which fixed penalty notices were issued.’

Boris Johnson pleads his innocence in Committee of Privileges opening statement

Ms Harman rejected the former PM’s demand that the inquiry only considers his discussion of coronavirus guidance.

The Labour grandee said the MPs on the cross-party committee will leave their ‘party interests at the door of the committee room and conduct our work in the interests of the House’ as she dismissed claims of bias.

She insisted the committee is ‘not relying’ on evidence provided by the Sue Gray report, as allies of Mr Johnson claim the inquiry is a ‘witch hunt’ now that the civil servant is joining Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s office.

Ms Harman added: ‘We have not changed the rules of the procedure that is not within our remit, that is laid down by the House, we’re bound to follow them, that is not what we’ve done.’

She said the evidence raises ‘clear questions and this is Mr Johnson’s opportunity to give us his answers’ before asking him to take the oath.

He swore to tell the truth before issuing an apology and adding ‘hand on heart, I did not lie to the House’.

He started with an apology for illegal gatherings in Number 10 and said: ‘That was wrong, I bitterly regret it, I understand public anger.

‘I continue to apologise for what happened on my watch. I take full responsibility’ but he said ‘I hand on heart I did not lie to the House’

Boris said it was ‘nonsense’ to suggest that it should have been obvious to him that rules were being broken in No 10 because of the pictures of him at events.

To suggest there were ‘illicit events in No 10 while allowing these events to be immortalised by an official photographer is staggeringly implausible’.

He said: ‘It seems to be the view of the committee and sadly many members of the public that they show me attending rule-breaking parties where no one was social distancing. They show nothing of the kind.

‘They show me giving a few words of thanks at a work event for a departing colleague. They show me with my red box passing on the way to another meeting or heading back into my flat to carry on working, often late into the night.

‘They show a few people standing together – as permitted by the guidance – where full social distancing is not possible and where mitigating measures are taken.

‘They show events which I was never fined for attending.’

Boris Johnson suggested that if it should have been obvious to him that rules were being broken, it should also have been apparent to current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

‘If it was obvious to me that these events were contrary to the guidance and the rules, then it must have been equally obvious to dozens of others, including the most senior officials in the country, all of them – like me – responsible for drawing up the rules.

‘And it must have been obvious to others in the building including the current Prime Minister.’

He said he does not think it ‘can seriously mean’ to accuse him of lying.

He said: ‘If it was obvious to me that these events were contrary to the guidance and to the rules then it must have been equally obvious to the dozens of others including the most senior officials in the country.’

He added it ‘must have been obvious to others in the building including the current Prime Minister’.

Mr Johnson said the ‘overwhelming evidence’ the committee has assembled is ‘that these individuals believed that the rules and the guidance were being complied with’.

He referred to the ‘total silence’ of any written or electronic record of concerns people wanted to raise with him and said the committee did not have evidence of any emails or WhatsApp messages that show he was warned about rule breaking before he made statements to the House of Commons.

‘You haven’t got any such evidence because that never happened,’ he said.

‘You are not only accusing me of lying, you are accusing all those civil servants, advisers, MPs, of lying about what they believed at the time to be going on, and as far as I know you’re not giving any of them the chance to explain themselves with their own oral evidence.

‘I don’t think you seriously mean to accuse those individuals of lying and I don’t think you can seriously mean to accuse me of lying.’

Boris Johnson defended his attendance at some of the events covered by the inquiry.

He told the Privileges Committee: ‘I know you will point to the photos and then to the guidance and what I said, and you will say ‘it must have been obvious that the guidance was being breached’. But that is simply not true.

‘My beliefs and my remarks to Parliament were indeed based on my knowledge of those events, but you have to understand how I saw them and what I saw during the period I was there.’

Referring to the leaving dos he attended, Mr Johnson said: ‘I know that people around the country will look at those events and think that they look like the very kind of events that we, or I, were forbidden to everyone else.

‘But I will believe until the day I die that it was my job to thank staff for what they had done, especially during a crisis like Covid, which kept coming back, which seemed to have no end and where people’s morale did, I’m afraid, begin to sink.

‘But never mind what I think, the more important point is that the police agreed – they didn’t find that my attendance at any of these farewell gatherings was against the rules.’

Social distancing was not ‘necessary or possible’ in Downing Street due to the working conditions in the ‘cramped’ 18th-century townhouse, Boris Johnson said.

The former prime minister said his comments that Covid guidance was followed in No 10 was based on ‘my understanding of the rules and the guidance’.

He told the Privileges Committee: ‘That did not mean that I believed that social distancing was complied with perfectly. That is because I and others in the building did not think it necessary or possible to have a two-metre, or one-metre after June 24, 2020, electrified forcefield around every human being.

‘Indeed that is emphatically not what the guidance proscribes.

‘It specifically says that social distancing should be maintained where possible, having regard to the work environment.

‘It was clear that in No 10 we had real difficulties in both working efficiently and at speed and in maintaining perfect social distancing.

‘It is a cramped, narrow, 18th century townhouse. We had no choice but to meet day in, day out, seven days a week in an unrelenting battle against Covid.’

Giving an account of the birthday party for which he was fined, Boris Johnson told MPs: ‘It never occurred to me – or I think the current Prime Minister – at the time that the event was not in compliance with the rules and the guidance.

‘At about 2.22pm on June 19, 2020 I went into the Cabinet Room where I worked after getting back from a long external visit.

‘I stood at my desk – briefly – before another Covid meeting began and had a kind of salad.

‘A number of officials came in to wish me a happy birthday. No one sang, the famous Union Jack cake remained in its Tupperware box, unnoticed by me, and was later discovered and eaten by my private secretaries.’

A ‘slightly exaggerated’ version of the event was briefed to The Times ‘with singing and cake eating’ and yet nothing untoward was detected ‘either by the reporter or by millions of eagle-eyed readers’.

That meant that when he addressed MPs ‘it did not for one second occur to me that this event, the one event for which I was fined, would later be found to be somehow against the rules’.

‘And the same goes for all the events I attended.’

Boris Johnson said it was ‘important’ for him to attend the leaving do of his former director of communications Lee Cain because it could have been a ‘potentially acrimonious’ moment.

Asked about a gathering on November 13, 2020, in which the former prime minister is seen in a photograph giving a toast, he told the Privileges Committee: ‘This meeting happened on an impromptu basis, it had to happen.

‘It happened because on November 13 two senior members… people will ask why was this happening, why was it necessary?

‘It was necessary because two senior members of staff, the effective chief of staff and director of communications had both left the building, or were about to leave the building in pretty acrimonious circumstances – or what were potentially acrimonious circumstances.

‘It was important for me to be there and to give reassurance.’

Mr Johnson highlighted that he was not fined by the Metropolitan Police for attending the event in No 10 and that the force ‘agreed it was a work-related event’.

‘I believe it was absolutely essential for work purposes,’ he added.

Asked whether he thought social distancing was being followed in the image of the gathering, he replied: ‘I believe that the guidance is being complied with.’

Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin told Boris Johnson the coronavirus guidance ‘does not say you can have a thank you party’.

Mr Johnson said: ‘I believed that this event was not only reasonably necessary but it was essential for work purposes.’

Lee Cain and Dominic Cummings had left their jobs ‘in very, very difficult and challenging circumstances’, and ‘it was necessary to steady the ship, it was necessary to show that there was no rancour, the business of the Government was being carried on – that’s what we had to do, that’s what I had to do’.

The former Conservative Party leader said he thought it ‘unlikely’ he, as claimed by an unnamed No 10 official, made a joke about a leaving-do being ‘probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now’.

Boris Johnson, asked about the remarks he was alleged to have made on November 27 2020, told the Privileges Committee: ‘I don’t remember saying those words.

‘I think it unlikely that I would have said those words given what I have had to say to the committee just now about my memory of the event.

‘My visual memory of the event was that it was much more, as Cleo Watson describes, it was a clutch of people around that table … I don’t remember people being four or five deep.’

Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin intervened as Mr Johnson looked to go on, saying: ‘I’m sorry, you are giving very long answers and it is taking longer than we need.

‘You are repeating yourself quite a lot. Can we just get on with the questions? Thank you very much.’

Boris Johnson was asked why he believed his June 19 2020 birthday party was within the rules, given his wife Carrie and interior designer Lulu Lytle were present.

Labour MP Yvonne Fovargue asked: ‘At least two people attended who were not work colleagues, why did you think this was reasonably necessary for work purposes, as required by the rules at the time?’

The former prime minister said: ‘I thought it was reasonably necessary for work purposes because I was standing at my desk, surrounded by officials who had been asked to come and wish me a happy birthday – I’d only recently recovered from an illness, from Covid, and it seemed to me to be a perfectly proper thing to do.

‘We were about to have another meeting and they were very largely the same officials.’

Ms Fovargue said: ‘Presumably your wife and the contractor were not attending that meeting.’

On Monday the group slammed his so-called ‘deadly dossier’ and said it contained ‘no new documentary evidence.’

He called the inquiry’s allegation ‘illogical’, arguing that some of those who attended the events ‘wished me ill and would denounce me if I concealed the truth’.

He wrote that it was ‘Far from achieving a ‘cover-up’. He said: ‘I would have known that any deception on my part would lead to instant exposure. This would have been senseless and immediately self-defeating.’

He said it was ‘implausible’ that he would have known the parties photographed and ‘immortalised’ by his official photographer were rule-breaking.

The only evidence that he intentionally misled the Commons is from the ‘discredited Dominic Cummings’, and that Cummings’ assertions are not ‘supported by any documentation’, Mr Johnson said.

In his evidence he accepts he misled the House of Commons when he said lockdown rules had been followed in No 10 but insisted the statements were made ‘in good faith’.

Further today Mr Johnson’s 110-page bundle of evidence was also released, and it showed what his lawyers had been fighting to get put into the document.

In the evidence, his top aide, Martin Reynolds, said Boris ignored his advice to change his line in parliament over whether he had broken his own Covid guidance.

In written evidence to the Privileges Committee, Mr Reynolds said: ‘I do recall asking the then prime minister about the line proposed for PMQs on December 7 suggesting that all rules and guidance had been followed.

‘He did not welcome the interruption but told me that he had received reassurances that the comms event was within the rules.

‘I accepted this but questioned whether it was realistic to argue that all guidance had been followed at all times, given the nature of the working environment in No 10. He agreed to delete the reference to guidance.’

In the pages of submitted evidence Mr Reynolds expressed further regret at his ‘bring your own booze’ party invite.

He said: ‘With the benefit of hindsight, the language used was totally inappropriate and gave a misleading impression of the nature of the event.

‘It was an event held because staff needed a morale boost after an extremely difficult period when all sorts of tensions had begun to surface and I hoped that being thanked by the PM and talking to each other might strengthen their sense of being part of one team.

‘The event was not a party in any normal sense of the word.’