Privilege: Conduct of Right Hon. Boris Johnson

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely]

It is a debate worthy of parliamentary time, but when I held a debate on the use of Imperial modelling, not a single Labour Member turned up apart from the shadow Minister. The point I am trying to make is that there were scandals and other important things about lockdown. One of the things we are criticised for, as the shadow Leader of the House will know, is having an obsession with ourselves when there are other great and important things to be discussed about covid and lockdown, not only whether Downing Street had—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. We have to remember what we are discussing today, without going too wide, because there are 14 other Members who want to contribute to the debate, and I think they want to talk about what is in the report.

[Bob Seely]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I will wind up if you think I am speaking out of turn or too widely. However, I was going to say that our mental health crisis is a scandal worth reporting. The fact is that this cost £400 billion, and the fact is that science was misused and trust abused. Lockdown was an experiment, and I do sometimes think that focusing the lockdown debate on the behaviour of the then Prime Minister is too narrow and does not do this House a service.

I will vote to support the Privileges Committee report, but I do wish that the same level of interest, especially from the Opposition, would sometimes focus on the stuff that actually made a difference in lockdown, not just on vindictively going after Boris Johnson.

[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—

--- Later in debate ---

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

A gentle reminder: we are talking about the report and its findings. If Members have speeches that they wrote two or three days ago and it contains things that are not relevant to the report, please could they lose those pages and concentrate on this debate? Jess Phillips is going to show us how to do it.