Privilege: Conduct of Right Hon. Boris Johnson

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Of course, it is quite wrong that this weak Prime Minister waved through that dishonourable honours list. He should really have thought again.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I am still confused about Labour’s position on the former Prime Minister’s honours list, because I have never heard anyone on the Labour Front Bench say they would abandon the practice. Surely, after all this, they cannot agree to a Prime Minister’s honours list. Will the hon. Lady now take this opportunity to clarify Labour’s position?

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I suggest the hon. Gentleman listens to the “Today” programme on catch-up, because my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), the Leader of the Opposition, made it very clear. Tony Blair did not have a resignation honours list and Gordon Brown did not have a resignation honours list. We believe this Prime Minister should have stood up to the former Prime Minister and his dishonourable honours list. This is no way to run a country. It is time the Conservatives stopped squabbling among themselves and focused on doing the right thing by the people who put them here.

As I mentioned earlier, Johnson attacked the Privileges Committee. The severity of the sanction imposed on him takes this into account, but it was not just him. Other Tory MPs have labelled the Committee a “kangaroo court”, so would the Leader of the House be able to tell us at some point, such as at business questions on Thursday, whether the Prime Minister understands the significance of these comments? What is he going to do about his own MPs who are undermining our democratic institutions? As this weak Prime Minister fails to step in to protect Parliament’s standards systems, I ask the Leader of the House whether she could step up. Will she explicitly condemn colleagues who have acted in this way? As Parliament’s representative in Government, will she demand that Ministers respect the institutions and practices of the House?

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[Pete Wishart]

My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech, as always.

They knew exactly the character of that man. They cheered on his buffoonery. It was them that foisted him upon our nation, and it is going to be them who will have to be held responsible and accountable for all the Johnson mess that he has left behind. We have four by-elections coming up in the next few weeks—three of them because of Johnson’s legacy. What does she think their chances are in those by-elections?

[Deidre Brock]

I never like to guess anything, but I would suggest that given the behaviour we have seen in recent weeks, those chances look pretty slim.

At the very least, Government Members should show some remorse for that cynicism, accept the recommendations of the report and vote to approve them. If they do not, I hope their cowardly refusal will dog them for the rest of their political lives. If ever there was a moment for them to stand up and be counted, it is now.

However, it is too much to expect apologies from all those who defended Johnson and kept him in his place. Unbelievably, the Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Jack), continues to support him, claiming he was not as unpopular in Scotland as was thought. The month before Johnson resigned as Prime Minister last year, an Ipsos MORI poll found that 83% of respondents had a negative view of him. If the Secretary of State for Scotland thinks opinions of the man have got better in Scotland since then, he has another think coming.

The Secretary of State for Scotland also claims, astoundingly, that the decisions Johnson took for Scotland will

“serve Scotland very well for decades to come”.

What a statement, when we consider the disastrous impact of the Brexit that Johnson was instrumental in persuading people to support on individuals and organisations up and down Scotland. Then there is the inadequacy of a replacement for EU funding, Treasury funds being ransacked like a sweetie jar to reward MPs, the Internal Market Act 2020, and the constant interference in devolved responsibilities. We are seeing the consequences of that with the UK Government effectively having a veto over legislation passed by our democratically elected Parliament in Scotland. The Secretary of State for Scotland is right in one way: Johnson’s toxic legacy of the decisions made by his Government and imposed on the Scottish people will certainly be affecting them for years to come, given Labour’s refusal to ditch Brexit in any Government that comes after this one.

As we know, some Members will not even be attending today’s debate. I hear that the Prime Minister is swithering —perhaps it is all a little too close to home given his own fixed penalty fine. What a spineless dereliction of the responsibilities of his office if he does not show active support for the Committee’s recommendations. The Committee’s conclusions are that Johnson deliberately misled the House and the Committee, breached confidence, impugned the Committee thereby undermining the democratic process of the House, and was complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the Committee.

What of the Prime Minister’s mantra of integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level? This House must not only endorse the report in full, but recover the legal fees wasted on Boris Johnson’s lies, rescind the honours he bestowed in disgrace, and prevent a single penny more of public money entering his pocket. We have suffered enough at his hands and at the hands of his Government. Boris Johnson lied to Parliament, deliberately misled the country and has shown no remorse for his behaviour. While time, money and energy have been spent on examining what was a self-evident truth a long time ago, the cost of living crisis continues to balloon and our constituents are suffering.

Is it not shameful and depressing, Mr Speaker, that it has taken this prolonged, detailed scrutiny by the Privileges Committee to force some Conservative Members finally to admit to Johnson’s faults? It is shocking that, even now, some of them are refusing to accept its conclusions. Scotland deserves better than this corrupt, outdated Westminster system that allows the likes of Johnson to rise to the top. I fear that even these recommendations from the Committee, decisive as they are, will not prevent the same from happening in the future. I worry that some Conservative MPs think that, by accepting the recommendations and taking some medicine, this will all go away again, and that cannot be allowed to happen.

In conclusion, yes, it is clearly beyond time that Westminster abandons the damaging traditions that protect those who lie in Parliament, reforms protocol, and enables MPs to accurately hold Ministers to account. All Members of the House should of course vote for the Committee’s recommendations. The question is this: is anything going to change—really change—on the back of the report. If Parliament fails to reform after this most egregious and obvious case, it will just prove that Westminster is incapable of even the most basic scrutiny of power, reform, or improvement. Are we confident that standards here will keep other Ministers to account when they stand up at the Dispatch Box? I am afraid that I am not.

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[Sir William Cash]

My right hon. Friend is a very good friend of mine—he really is—as indeed of some Members on the other side of the House. I would simply like to say this. I am not in control of whether there is going to be an amendment. [Interruption.] No, I am making the point that, as far as I am concerned, there is an issue here that is being debated. Many people are absenting themselves for what they believe to be very good reasons. I am simply taking the view that somebody may decide that they are going to divide the House and I am leaving that as an open question for the time being. However, the statements made by Boris Johnson on the Floor of the House—

[Pete Wishart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir William Cash]

Not just now, thank you. I want to get on to this other point.

The statements made by Boris Johnson on the Floor of the House were in fact about legal interpretation of the covid rules and the guidance in respect of No.10. The Justice Committee conducted an excellent inquiry, reporting in September 2021, on the meaning and effect of the covid rules and guidance, several months before partygate emerged as an issue. That report is of great importance because it endorsed the incisive legal analysis of the former counsel for domestic legislation, the present Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. He highlighted the legal uncertainty of the regulations and guidance, stating in evidence to the Committee that

“there has been a lack of clarity as to what regulations applied to specific situations at what times…The combination of regulations and guidance, and the lack of clarity as to where one starts and the other stops, have been recurring themes of the coronavirus regulations.”

I strongly recommend that Opposition Members listen to that. It is very important in deciding whether a person can lie in those circumstances, because the same applied to subsequent regulations. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards emphasised that that lack of clarity undermined the rule of law. That could not have been more apparent than in the differences in approach between that of the Durham police authority on the Barnard Castle incident and that taken in relation to the Leader of the Opposition and beer drinking at a particular event, which led to no action and, on the other hand, the Metropolitan police in relation to No. 10, which did lead to action. The essential point about all of this is that no one, not even the lawyers, knew what the law was. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards made that crystal clear. Even the civil servants who drafted the regulations were fined for non-compliance.

I now come to the fundamental issue of whether Boris Johnson can be accused of knowingly lying to the House. It is clear from what I have said that the accusation that the former Prime Minister had deliberately or knowingly misled that House, as set out in the current and existing 1997 resolution, put together by Tony Blair and John Major and endorsed unanimously by the House as a whole, can only be derived from a proper legal interpretation of the words on which Boris Johnson was relying and of the legal advice he had received inside No. 10 on each occasion on which he is accused. I find no publication of that legal advice in this report. Boris Johnson therefore, in my view, cannot have been found guilty of knowingly misleading Parliament if no lawyers, let alone the Prime Minister, who is not a lawyer, could get the legal position right. The regulations and the guidance entirely lacked legal certainty. Therefore the Prime Minister could not have knowingly misled the House.

Why, as I believe to be the case, did the Committee not obtain evidence from those lawyers in No. 10 who provided legal advice when it was so crucial? If it did, why has that evidence apparently not been published? Boris Johnson cannot therefore have knowingly misled the House, and that should have been the end of it. I do not see how contempt can be attributed in these circumstances, for he simply could not have knowingly misled Parliament on any rational interpretation of the word “knowingly”, which the original motion left out.

Those who argue that now the report has been published it is all over and done, and those who say that the dogs bark but the caravan moves on, miss the wood for the trees. The caravan of this House, having moved on, will certainly come back. Then the dogs will not merely bark, but they will bite, and Parliament will be the victim, and it is likely that any future Labour Government will get caught up in it—although heaven forbid one should ever be elected. I therefore do not approve of this motion.

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[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

Boris Johnson is a liar. It would have been unthinkable to say that in this House only a few short months ago: Boris Johnson is a liar. There is something still fundamentally and profoundly shocking about saying that in this hallowed setting of the House of Commons—this institution that we revere so much. But there is no other way to put it: Boris Johnson lied to this House.

We were saying that long before that concept became fashionable. The SNP even held a debate on that very issue several months ago, to highlight that point and to ensure it was heard loud and clear in this Chamber. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) was grandly marched out of this place for asserting something that is now a profound truth, as was the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler). She is absolutely right that a retrospective apology should now go to both of those Members for getting it absolutely right. There is a stain on their parliamentary records for the fact that they were asked to leave this place for saying something that we now know to be a conventional truth.

SNP Members were some of the first to bring up issues about the parties. We wanted to ensure that the House understood clearly what was going on: we had a Prime Minister who was happy to have drinks parties for his staff in a number of locations in No. 10, when he had overseen the introduction of legislation that everybody else in this country diligently followed. Constituents of ours missed christenings and weddings—for goodness sake, they missed funerals—while seeing newspaper photos of that Prime Minister standing with glasses of wine in his hand. We said that his cavalier attitude towards interpreting the rules—rules that he himself had set—made him unfit for public office. We knew that a reckoning would be coming and that, eventually, his reign of chaos would come to an inevitable and disastrous end. This report vindicates us utterly and absolutely for everything that we have been saying for 15 or 16 months. We even predicted his response to this report: his refusal to take responsibility; his lashing out at others who had correctly judged him; his attempts to undermine others who had adjudicated on this process; and his attempts to divert attention and to obfuscate.

Although this report is bad enough—and it is awful—his behaviour since has compounded everything that we thought we knew about him. It is hard to believe that there has ever been anyone so ill-equipped for high office or so ill-disposed to lead a country. He is a man-child playing politics. He invented this bizarre persona to sustain him through the day, creating a smoke screen to divert attention from his real essence.

Johnson’s inevitable defenestration and removal from public life could almost have been scripted. Not for Boris Johnson a casual and easy departing into the night, but the screaming and shouting of someone who just cannot leave the scene. Not for him any hanging around to accept his punishment and the verdict of his peers. He was such a coward when it came to this decision that he quickly resigned his seat so that he would be beyond the clutches of this Parliament. Almost unbelievably, though, he still hankers after this notion—this fantasy—that he will have some route back to elected politics. It is hard to imagine a situation where that would be allowed in this House. I think that we can conclude today that he is toast and thank God he has gone.

Let me turn now to some of the responses of Conservative Members. They knew everything about Johnson. He is a serial sackee. There are very few places where he has worked that he has not been sacked from, but they still made him Prime Minister. I made my maiden speech the same day as Boris Johnson. I actually followed him from these Benches the day he made his maiden speech. Even at that point there were doubts about his character—his ability even to be just a Member of Parliament. But not for Conservative Members; they went on to make him Prime Minister. They celebrated him. They cheered him on through his bizarre and boorish speeches. They credited him with the 2019 victory and they made sure that it was him who delivered the disaster that is Brexit—something that my constituents, as well as constituents right round this country, are still paying for.

We are in the end period of the Johnsonian era. Regardless of how much Conservative Members want to move on, they will never be able to move on from him until they take decisive action to cleanse their party from the stain of him—something that they do not seem prepared to do. But they have an opportunity to do so tonight. There will be a vote. Here is the challenge to every single member of the Conservative party: line up with us and back the Privileges Committee report and ensure that we have a decisive outcome in this House. Every Member has an opportunity to express their opinion.

We do not share the reverence for this place that other Members on both sides of the House have. We want to leave it. We do not share the value that people place on this House of Commons. We are not dewy-eyed about it. But there are things that we do believe in: democracy, truth, and doing the right thing. Those are the fundamental values of politics that should determine the actions of everybody here. Failure to live up to them should have a consequence—a consequence that should be taken forward right now. I do not think that the report of the Committee of Privileges went far enough. I would have had Johnson banned and excluded from ever getting back into elected politics, but I welcome what the Committee has done—the thorough job that it has undertaken on behalf of everybody in the House. I now say to everyone in the Chamber: back us this evening. Let us speak with one voice, with everyone trooping through the Lobby. There should be no return for Johnson. Let us pledge that loud and clear.