Privilege: Conduct of Right Hon. Boris Johnson

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Reclaim)]

All that glitters is not gold. The Overton window is framed by a vignette of deceit, and right hon. and hon. Members seem intent on paying homage to it above all else. Some will say and some have said that Boris Johnson misled the Committee and misled Parliament, and others that the Committee set out to achieve its predetermined goal of finding him guilty on all charges. Many of the public hold both views at once, and they are not mutually exclusive, so this pantomime staggers on.

The reality is that Parliament and the public are about as far out of lockstep with each other as they have ever been. I am not sure that the public in the real world care too much about this any more. I think very few people out there in the real world trust Boris Johnson. Sadly, through the process we have seen and the collateral damage to the reputation of this House, I think the Privileges Committee itself has been damaged and may be damaged further by revelations.

The public concern is very much to say, “a plague on all your houses”. What has caused this loss of public confidence in the procedures of the House? Well, the evidence is damning: Boris Johnson and his Government used behavioural scientists and spin doctors to clinically instil unreasonable fear to scare the public into ceasing their normal lives under the guise of a biological threat so deadly that they dared not go outside to see another person.

We all remember the relentless, day in, day out, informing of the public by Ministers in No. 10 about death rates and horror stories. We remember the signs everywhere we looked, we remember the adverts on the television and we remember the supermarket car parks filled with masked citizens each forced to stand in their own car parking bay. The relentless messaging from No. 10 was, “Stand on the stickers, follow the signposts, wash your hands, don’t see your loved ones”. The Government decided it was their job to be that of a parent and they saw the country as a toddlers playgroup, turning our police into teaching assistants, au pairs and, dare I say it, nannies. On every single account, they robbed the public of their dignity. It was nothing short of unacceptable. Our ancestors would be rightly ashamed of the situation.

During that period, the public yet again showed that their natural inclination, as fellow Brits, was to good-natured compliance and community spirit. We saw some of the largest demonstrations of kindness I have ever seen and those demonstrations, under immense pressure, showed the real spirit of the British people. Their altruism held up a mirror to the true nature of the appalling behaviour at No. 10. Any contention the public had that, in No. 10, “They have the latest, most accurate scientific data in front of them, and therefore these measures were justified in the face of the extreme risk” now has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the truth. The fact is that the same people who took the unprecedented powers to suspend our freedoms knew that these measures were nothing short of political posturing. They knew they were pointless. If the risks were really what they said they were and the science of the effectiveness of the lockdowns was that demonstrable, surely they would have been the most strident adherers to the rules—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Mr Bridgen, you heard what I said to Mr Seely. We are talking about the contents of the report and you are going way wider than that now.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Well, I think the behaviour of No. 10 was—

[Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Bridgen]

I will give way.

[Adam Holloway]

Look, while it is very exciting to see what is going on and to remove a Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority, can we not just think about what happened here or did not happen here? What did the police and Sue Gray actually come up with? The guy was delivered a piece of cake. I would have been the first person, if Boris had had parties in the flat or whatever else, to stand up here and whinge about it, but the reality is that what we know is that he accepted a piece of cake. So can people not accept that, just possibly, the guy stood there and really did not believe he was misleading the House?

[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question and I think his misplaced loyalty to Boris Johnson is laudable. However, the behaviour in Downing Street bore a closer resemblance to the set of “Love Island” than to a collection of our country’s top minds and high performers working tirelessly to steer us through dangerous waters. This was at the same time as they went further than any other British Government have gone before them to take more and more powers under the wing of the state.

The question is: are internal parliamentary Committees and state inquiries agenda-driven? Well, who can fault the public for thinking that they probably are, because when we look at the covid inquiry that has now started, it is requiring all participants to take lateral flow tests in 2023. Yes, the bubble surrounding the Westminster political elite has become absolutely opaque. The public cannot understand it and it cannot understand the public. I am afraid that the bubble has well and truly burst. The consensus still about the lockdowns is that they were sensible, practical and acceptable for the public. The only discussion ever allowed in this place was how long the lockdowns should be. But lockdowns and restrictions were not for anybody at No. 10; they were only for the little people.

If the data had really indicated that the virus was

“the most vicious threat this country has faced in my lifetime”—

they are the words of the former Prime Minister himself—then why were those who were seeing the data at first hand and were privy to all the later briefings continually breaching their own rules? While they locked us in our houses, they went to parties. When they forced us to wear masks, they broke out the party hats. They closed our schools and they opened the bottles. Well, I’m glad they had such a good time.

[Adam Holloway]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bridgen]

I have already given way to the hon. Gentleman.

The rest of our experiences and the collective memories of lockdown were not that great, to be honest. It was isolation, destroyed livelihoods, missed goodbyes to loved ones, and a new relationship with our state that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to history lessons and modern China—something that none of us ever dreamed would be true in present-day Britain.

We are all human, with all our human failings. Our health is incredibly important to us all, and we all welcome modern advances in medicine that over the centuries have reduced the nastier realities of life. But we never wanted this. What has happened at the top of our Government? The makers of the covid regulations deemed that their work meetings were more important than our children’s education. It is almost as if they wanted to make incompetence endemic. We can never give the children back the years of schooling that they lost, and we can never give the public back the time that we robbed from them. But we can give them answers and legislative assurances that we will never, ever replay that fiasco. Finally, let us sign the whole thing off as a job badly done, a chapter to consign to history and a stark lesson in how not to govern. The people of North West Leicestershire feel betrayed and they have been betrayed. It must never, ever happen again.

[Several hon. Members rose—]