Boris at bay

It was the biggest test of the biggest beast in British politics. Boris Johnson was grilled live on television for four hours by the Privileges Committee of the House of Commons. And Boris at bay was the best show in town, a reminder of how much more exciting — if also exasperating— politics had been when he was in charge.

The former Prime Minister did not disappoint. He came out with plenty of memorable lines: “I’m not going to pretend that the guidance was followed…er, er…rigidly!” “Anyone who thinks we partied through lockdown doesn’t know what they’re talking about!” And to his fellow Tory and Brexiteer, Sir Bernard Jenkin: “That’s complete nonsense!!!”

The charge is that he misled the House about ‘Partygate’ — a cardinal sin for a Prime Minister. If he is found guilty, the committee could suspend him from the Commons, subject to a vote by the whole House.

A suspension of ten days or more would almost certainly trigger a by-election in Uxbridge, Boris’s highly marginal constituency. With Labour 20 points ahead in the polls, he would struggle to hold his seat.

At stake, then, is the former Prime Minister’s political survival. In effect, he is on trial — but lacking any of the legal rights and protections that apply in any normal court of law.

In medieval times, before jury trials, the accused might be subjected to ordeal by fire or water. For Boris, it is ordeal by innuendo — less grisly, but no less grim. Not one of the MPs who cross-examined him would have been allowed to sit as jurors in a real trial, let alone to play the roles of investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury.

The odds were stacked against him. Harriet Harman, the veteran Labour MP who chaired the committee, insisted that she and her colleagues were genuinely open-minded. Yet already last April she was tweeting that Boris had “misled” the Commons. How impartial could she be? Boris put it down to “the cut and thrust” of politics, but he clearly didn’t trust either the chairwoman or her fellow committee members. Ms Harman may be the Mother of the House, but there was nothing maternal about her gimlet stare and she gave the accused no chance to deploy any of his debating skills, charm or bluster.

Even before Wednesday’s hearing, the committee had published a report that strongly suggested that it had already made up its mind to condemn the ex-PM. Boris’s legal team, led by the eminent barrister David Pannick KC, responded with its own lengthy dossier of evidence to support his case. Lord Pannick argued had been “cherry-picking” from the vast quantity of testimony it has gathered over the past ten months.

The ex-PM’s lawyers claim that the committee is so hostile to him that they have suppressed key evidence. Making it public would have undermined the received wisdom: that Boris partied through lockdown, broke the law and lied to Parliament.

The truth is that all the 23 witnesses from whom the committee has taken written testimony actually support his case. None of them states either that the then Prime Minister knew that these gatherings were illegal, or that he knowingly misled MPs.

But the committee hearing gave him an even rougher ride than he expected. He did, however, come out fighting. With Lord Pannick sitting behind his client, his face fixed in a lawyerly smile, Boris launched into a critique of the committee’s impartiality.

This line of attack was somewhat disarmed during the hearing, which was forensic and generally fair-minded. Boris was asked whether he shared the view of many of his friends and supporters that the committee was a “kangaroo court” and its investigation a “witch-hunt”. He refused to use such language but he also declined an opportunity to say that the committee might be “fair but wrong”. If it found him in contempt, he said, it would be “unfair and wrong”. He clearly saw the whole exercise as an attempt to destroy his credibility and occasionally his simmering fury boiled over.

One of the main lines of questioning challenged his reliance upon the advice of his political staff. Harriet Harman dismissed the “repeated assurances” that the Covid rules and guidance had been followed “at all times” as “flimsy”.

Why, the committee wanted to know, had he not consulted a Government law officer or at least a senior civil servant, such as the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case? Boris looked briefly nonplussed, but fell back on the fact that he had in fact appointed Case to hold an inquiry a few days after the story broke.

In recent weeks, however, even more damning proof has emerged that so-called Partygate — or at least Boris’s role in it — is, to quote the man himself, an inverted pyramid of piffle.

What lent credence to this scandal last year was, above all, the report by Sue Gray — once the grandest of Whitehall panjandrums, and on that basis appointed by Boris Johnson himself to investigate ‘Partygate’.

The former Cabinet Office minister Sir Oliver Letwin once said, only half in jest: ‘Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray.’

Well, now we know a little more about this all-powerful lady. Last November she was secretly approached by Sir Keir Starmer to be his chief of staff — an offer she appears to have accepted without going through any of the proper procedures for mandarins who leave the civil service.

One of the most unexpected revelations of the hearing was that Boris Johnson had relied heavily on Sue Gray’s evidence and was dismayed to find that Harriet Harman insisted that the committee had not.

It was left to Sir Charles Walker, the most patrician MP on the committee, to put it to him that he had been “reckless” — that he had not taken enough care to ensure that his statements to the House were accurate.

Boris vehemently denied this. The fact is that he still maintains that there were no “parties”, merely “work events”; that the rules and guidance were followed, albeit “imperfectly”, at all times when he was present; and that he never knowingly told the Commons anything he did not believe to be true.

In short, this was a performance worthy of the great Edith Piaf: “Non, je ne regrette rien…” Whatever the committee’s verdict, Boris will fight on, and fight to win. The only trouble is that Margaret Thatcher promised to do the same in 1990, just before she resigned. This ordeal by innuendo could prove to have been Boris Johnson’s last stand.

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