Boris Johnson allies issue warning to Sunak over Partygate ‘witch-hunts’

Boris Johnson’s allies have issued a dramatic warning to Rishi Sunak, saying they will meet on Wednesday to “consider options” about how to force the government to stop “witch-hunts” as police began investigating new Partygate claims.

Ahead of prime minister’s questions, Johnson’s supporters upped the ante on the already febrile Conservative benches by calling the decision to hand over evidence of gatherings at Chequers during Covid the “final straw”.

They accused two Cabinet Office ministers of having signed off the decision to pass on the former prime minister’s diaries to the Metropolitan and Thames Valley police forces.

The justice secretary, Alex Chalk, hit back, saying there was “no ministerial intervention” and added: “Whether it was the right judgment turns on what’s in those documents.”

Johnson, whose influence among MPs has waned over recent months, is furious about the move. He had given taxpayer-funded lawyers hired by the Cabinet Office a number of documents as they prepared his defence for the public inquiry into the pandemic.

However, when concerns were flagged to senior officials in the Cabinet Office, they felt obliged under the civil service code to refer the material to the police.

Johnson has threatened to sue the Cabinet Office in retaliation, according to the Daily Mail.

On Wednesday morning, an ally of Johnson’s said: “Boris has been supporting the government, but this act is final straw. There are a growing number of MPs who want the party leadership to act to stop these witch-hunts and a group of MPs will meet today to consider options. Meanwhile, members across country are being organised.”

Chalk tried to play down any suggestion the government was unfairly agitating against Johnson by handing over the bundle of documents to police.

“From the civil service point of view, if they’d sat on it and suppressed it, people would have criticised them. If they passed it on, that will raise questions as well,” he told radio station LBC.

He stressed he had not seen the contents of the evidence, so said it was “very difficult to make a judgment” but added it was important for the process to “take its course in the normal way”.

Despite the row and Sunak still deciding whether to launch an investigation into his home secretary, Suella Braverman, for potentially breaching the ministerial code, Chalk called the prime minister “a man of consummate integrity”.

The two standards issues are separate, but some Tory MPs are trying to draw a link between them and other incidents, such as bullying claims against Dominic Raab, to accuse the Whitehall “blob” of underhandedly trying to remove politicians from office.

Labour has called for Sunak’s government to stop using taxpayers’ money to cover Johnson’s legal costs.

Anneliese Dodds, the party’s chair, told Sky News the prime minister “just seems to be too weak to stand up to interest in his party”.

She said the “moral argument is very, very clear” that Johnson should not be getting hundreds of thousands of pounds in public money, while simultaneously making millions from his post-No 10 speaking circuit.

“People up and down our country made huge sacrifices during that Covid period,” she said, recalling how people were not allowed to attend funerals. “Yet again, we have Boris Johnson, who was found by the police to have broken the rules of course, basically ripping off the taxpayer. This is just unacceptable.”

Johnson is still subject to an investigation by the privileges committee, which is looking into whether he misled parliament and can levy a sanction, if it finds he did. A suspension from parliament could lead to a byeelection.

The seven-member committee, with a Tory majority and Labour chair, postponed its weekly meeting on Tuesday in light of the new evidence about events at Chequers and is due to meet on Wednesday instead.