An influential Tory backbencher has said Boris Johnson would be ‘long gone’ if he was in any other job after breaking Covid rules.
MPs are voting today on Labour’s proposals for a Commons committee to investigate the PM’s past comments on lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street and Whitehall.
Johnson – who is currently on a trip to India – denies knowingly misleading members over the Partygate scandal.
He told them repeatedly that no rules were broken after more and more reports of boozy bashes began emerging late last year.
After he was fined by the Metropolitan Police this month for attending his own birthday party in June 2020, he reiterated that he did not think he was breaking the rules at the time.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak – who is in Washington for the IMF’s spring meeting – was also caught breaking the rules and was reportedly talked out of quitting to save the PM’s reputation.
Johnson faced calls to resign from both sides of the house as he issued a shame-faced apology on Tuesday, but still he clings onto his job.
Speaking in the Commons today, Steve Baker said the contrition shown by the PM ‘only lasted as long as it took to get out of the headmaster’s study’.
He added: ‘That’s not good enough for me, and that’s not good enough for my voters.’
The MP for Wycombe said: ‘I have to acknowledge that if the Prime Minister occupied any other office of senior responsibility… he would be long gone.
He added: ‘The reason that he is not long gone is because removing a sitting prime minister is an extremely grave matter and an extremely big decision.
‘It tends to untether history, and all of us should approach such things with reverence and awe and an awareness of the difficulty of doing it and the potential consequences.
‘That’s why I’ve been tempted to forgive. But I have to say now, the possibility of that really for me has gone.’
He said that for not obeying ‘the letter and the spirit’ of the law, the Prime Minister ‘now should be long gone’.
Only two days ago, Baker had offered his support for the PM after his apology for breaking lockdown rules.
But he said he had a change of heart as MPs discussed whether to approve an investigation by the Committee of Privileges into Johnson’s response to Partygate.
Early Tory MPs had been told to support an amendment delaying a vote on Labour’s proposed motion until separate investigations by the police and civil servant Sue Gray had finished.
Speaking to Sky News, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, predicted that Conservative colleagues would support the move, describing it as ‘the right thing to do’.
But Tory MPs were later told they would have a free vote and that the amendment had been dropped.
Urging MPs to draw a line under the issue as he intervened on a speech by Labour’s Andy McDonald, Conservative former health minister Steve Brine said: ‘Right now this House should be discussing childhood cancers.
‘Now, if one was a parent of a child with cancer, I suggest that they would rather the House were discussing that than this.
‘That is not to minimise this, but this issue needs to be resolved and we need to move on and for that reason I will be supporting the main motion, with him I suspect, this evening.’
Middlesbrough MP McDonald replied: ‘He is right, we all want to move on from this, but we will find unless this issue is resolved we will be back to it forever until such a time as the Prime Minister accepts the consequences of his actions.
‘We need that leadership and we are robbed of it at the moment. That is the entire point. Of course cancer with children is critically more important. We want to get on to that, but we cannot have this issue hanging over us.’
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