Boris Johnson’s grilling by MPs over the Partygate scandal has got underway in parliament.
The former PM will face around four hours of questioning about whether he misled the government and attended a number of parties during lockdown.
Mr Johnson will outline his defence that although he admits misleading MPs, he said he ‘didn’t mean too.’
He is battling to save his political career and in a 52-page document submitted on Monday he said what he did at the time was what he believed to be right.
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.
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.’
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 forbidding 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.’
This afternoon he will face a live grilling by the cross-party group of MPs in a hearing that could decide his political fate.
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’.
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.’
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