Boris banjaxed by Partygate probe

Boris Johnson’s allies have hit back with fury at the “vindictive” privileges committee report which found the former PM guilty of deliberately misleading the Commons over lockdown parties – and a litany of other wrongdoings.

The utterly scathing verdict of the majority-Tory committee was that Johnson’s behaviour, including being “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation” of the privileges committee amounted to “an attack on democratic institutions”.

It recommended that he be suspended from the Commons for 90 days. Johnson announced his resignation as an MP on Friday. 

Johnson’s case – that his inadvertent telling of an un-truth to Parliament was cock-up, not conspiracy – was demolished by the devastating report. You can read Johnson’s disdainful riposte in full here.

Loyalists have come out to bat for Boris. Sir Simon Clarke, a former Cabinet minister, said he was “amazed at the harshness of today’s report” and the “punishment is absolutely extraordinary to the point of sheer vindictiveness”. 

“Spiteful, vindictive and overreaching” was how Brendan Clarke-Smith, a Johnson-supporting Tory backbencher, put it.  

And his biggest cheerleader, Nadine Dorries, pronounced that the committee had “overreached” and that any Tory MP who voted to approve the report’s findings was “fundamentally not a Conservative”.

On the charge he deliberately misled Parliament, Johnson said this was “rubbish” and based on “a series of things that are patently absurd”, calling the process a “witch-hunt”. 

The public isn’t so sure. Fresh YouGov polling found that 69 per cent of Britons think Johnson knowingly misled Parliament over Covid rule breaches, as do 51 per cent of Tory voters.

And while a slim plurality of Tory voters think Johnson did not get a fair hearing from the privileges committee – 40 per cent to 33 per cent – the wider public think he did, by 47 per cent to 20 per cent.

So, what now?

The report will be debated in the Commons, with a vote held on whether to approve the findings on Monday.

MPs are expected to approve the report, after Commons leader Penny Mordaunt said Tory MPs would not be ordered to vote against it.

On the by-election front, it was confirmed this afternoon that the Tories will be defending Boris Johnson and Nigel Adams’ vacated seats on 20 July, just before MPs break for the summer recess.

And having jumped before he was pushed, Johnson will formally exit the Commons once the convoluted quitting process plays out in the coming weeks. 

His immediate priority is likely to be getting his finances back on track after buying a £4m nine-bed Georgian manor house (complete with moat) in Oxfordshire.

But by questioning the legitimacy of the committee rather than accepting its damning verdict, Johnson is erecting the scaffolding for an eventual political return.  

Could the cold, dead hand of zombie Boris thrust through the earth of his political grave?

Picture the scene. It’s 2027. Partygate is ancient history. Labour has a 50-seat majority in the Commons. And Sir Keir Starmer’s government is gaining momentum in the polls after a shaky start, thanks to a modest economic recovery. After Rishi Sunak stood down in the wake of a general election drubbing two years earlier, the new leader, Kemi Badenoch, is struggling to hold together a party beset by infighting and despair.

The Tories are in meltdown and desperately casting around for anyone who could revive their electoral fortunes, a tried and tested vote-winner, popular with the grassroots…

It’s depressing to think about and highly unlikely. But so is much about Boris Johnson.  

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