The former Prime Minister has said he accepts he misled parliament, but it was what he believed at the time.
Johnson rejected the committee’s belief that the evidence strongly suggested breaches of coronavirus rules would have been ‘obvious’ to the then-prime minister.
At one point, he even claimed having a photographer present at the ‘parties’ showed that he didn’t know he was breaking the rules.
Seething over Johnson’s defence, Susanna said: ‘We’ll finally here in detail his defence over partygate, the scandal where numerous gatherings were held at No. 10’.
Talking about his 50-page defence, Susanna continued by saying she ‘needed a few breaks’ while reading it, and said: ‘He seems to use every single excuse in the book. The first excuse is that the committee itself is “unfair” and that they’re all biased, so first he wants to discredit the committee.
‘The second thing is he says, that “no one warned me that these were rule-breaking gatherings, but the people that did warn me – because he acknowledges actually that he was warned – you can’t believe them because they’re trying to discredit me.
‘”Dominic Cummings has a problem with me, so if he says he warned me, you can’t trust him, so I wasn’t warned except by people who did warn me, but you can’t believe them.”
‘The third thing he says was, “We did follow the rules”. So he believes there was a special exemption in the rules for moral-boosting gatherings.
‘I wonder how many work places and how many families wish that they’d known that in the rules you could legitimately say it was important for moral that you held gatherings and said thank you to people and toasted them and had wine and had cheese and gave gifts and perhaps had a quiz and a Secret Santa.
‘I think a lot of people would think that went reasonably necessary for work, to having a bit of a knees-up.
‘And then he says, he didn’t realise any of these things were breaking the rules apart from the one that did break the rules because he got a fixed penalty notice for it, but that’s all a bit of a mystery to him – he doesn’t understand it.’
‘Even when the police determined that he broke the rules, he doesn’t understand why he broke the rules. It’s absolutely remarkable.’
Susanna added: ‘The icing on the cake, the cherry on the top of the birthday cake is, “We can’t have been breaking the rules because we had a photographer there, and if we knew we were breaking the rules why would we have had a photographer there.”‘
Co-host Ed Balls added: ‘It is all remarkable,’ before questioning how ‘reckless’ the former Prime Minister was.
‘Even if he didn’t know it was a lie, should he have known? And was it reckless of him to go to these events, and somehow in his mind, not think booze, cheese and wine, 30 people, not just six people, socially distancing out the window, oh my gosh, it walks like a party, it moves like a party, it’s a party!
‘And if he didn’t know that, was that reckless?’
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays from 6am on ITV1.
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