The House of Commons privileges committee has found that Boris Johnson repeatedly misled MPs when he told them he knew nothing about lockdown-breaking social gatherings in and around Downing Street. These are the main points of a highly damning and hugely detailed report.
Key findings on wrongdoing
Johnson was found to have committed five serious offences:
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Deliberately misleading the Commons when he repeatedly said that either no Covid rules were broken, or that he had been assured none were broken.
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Deliberately misleading the privileges committee when he reiterated the same argument.
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Breaching confidence by leaking part of the report in advance in his letter last Friday when he announced his departure as an MP.
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“Impugning” the committee, and thus parliamentary processes.
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Complicity in a “campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee”.
The punishment
If Johnson had not resigned as an MP, the committee would have recommended a 90-day suspension from parliament – extremely long, and well beyond the threshold needed for his constituents to have sought a byelection.
The original recommendation was to have been a 20-day suspension, still greater than the 10-day minimum for a possible byelection. This was increased after Johnson’s letter resigning as an MP on Friday revealed parts of the findings and condemned the process as unfair and biased.
The committee has recommended that he should not be given a pass allowing him access to parliament as an ex-MP, a traditional privilege.
The punishment could have been greater
Minutes of the committee’s final pre-publication meeting on 13 June show that two MPs – Labour’s Yvonne Fovargue and Allan Dorans of the SNP – sought to amend the punishment so Johnson was expelled altogether from parliament. This was voted down. The last MP to be expelled was Labour’s Garry Allighan in 1947, after he sold information about private party meetings to journalists and then lied about it.
The key section
Sixty pages into the report is arguably the central section, summing up what Johnson did and why it matters:
The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the prime minister, the most senior member of the government. There is no precedent for a prime minister having been found to have deliberately misled the house.
He misled the house on an issue of the greatest importance to the house and to the public, and did so repeatedly. He declined our invitation to reconsider his assertions that what he said to the house was truthful. His defence to the allegation that he misled was an ex post facto justification and no more than an artifice. He misled the committee in the presentation of his evidence.
Johnson could face a new contempt inquiry
During the writing of the report, details emerged of alleged lockdown-breaking parties at No 10 and at Chequers, the prime ministerial country retreat. The committee said they did not want to delay their findings, and so accepted Johnson’s assurances that there was no wrongdoing.
They added that if “it subsequently emerges that Mr Johnson’s explanations are not true, then he may have committed a further contempt”.
Elsewhere, a footnote says that if WhatsApp messages handed by Johnson to the public inquiry into Covid contain relevant material, “this would be a serious matter which the house might need to revisit”.
Reprimands for MPs who criticised the committee?
This was perhaps only a hint, but a strong one. Early in the report, the committee noted what it called “a sustained attempt, seemingly coordinated, to undermine the committee’s credibility and, more worryingly, that of those members serving on it”.
If such behaviour was not challenged, they argued, “it will be impossible for the house to establish such a committee to conduct sensitive and important inquiries in the future”.
The committee, it added, “will be making a special report separately to the House dealing with these matters”.
How Johnson misled MPs
The report said he did this by:
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Saying guidance was followed fully at No 10, and that this had been the case when he attended gatherings.
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Failing to tell the Commons about his own knowledge of gatherings where rules or guidance were broken.
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Saying he relied on assurances from officials and others that rules had not been broken. These “were not accurately represented by him to the house”, the report found, and were not properly authoritative, and should not have been given as proof of compliance.
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aying he could not answer questions before the issues had been investigated by Sue Gray, the senior civil servant who initially reported on the parties, when he already had personal knowledge he did not reveal.
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Purporting to correct the record, but instead continuing to mislead, and also misleading the committee with continued denials.
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Being “deliberately disingenuous when he tried to reinterpret his statements to the house to avoid their plain meaning”, for example making “unsustainable interpretations” of Covid rules to justify gatherings.
Findings on the social gatherings
The report examined the various events at the centre of the debate, and was largely damning about the idea they were within the rules. On the 20 May 2020 “bring your own booze” garden party, the committee concluded: “We do not consider that a social gathering held purely for the purpose of improving staff morale can be regarded as having been essential for work purposes.”
It dismissed the argument that leaving drinks were needed to boost work morale, saying “organisations across the UK were suffering severe staff morale pressures”.
On Johnson’s brief birthday event in June 2020, for which he was given a fixed-penalty notice (FPN), the report cited the former PM’s protestations of bafflement, adding: “We note that he had the right in law to decline to accept the FPN if he had wished to assert he had committed no offence, but that he chose not to do so.”
The report noted that Johnson’s sometimes brief attendance at events did not excuse him. With one crammed leaving event for a staffer, in November 2020, Johnson said he was there for about 10 minutes.
It added: “This would have afforded him opportunity to observe a large gathering of people in the relatively small space of the vestibule.”
It said that when a press office Christmas drinks event took place in December 2020, even though Johnson did not attend, he was “unlikely to have been unaware” of it, as he walked past the press office to his personal flat.
Other evidence about the No 10 culture
In a supplement of additional material, released by the committee with the report, a Downing Street official who is not named gave damning evidence about what they saw as a culture of Covid rule-breaking.
The official said that “wine time Fridays” were “calendared weekly events in our Outlook diaries starting at 4pm, where press officers would gather on Fridays to have drinks”. They went on:
During the pandemic, No 10, despite setting the rules to the country, was slow to enforce any rules in the building. The press office wine time Fridays continued throughout, social distancing was not enforced, and mask wearing was not enforced.I was enquired to [name redacted] in March 2020 whether we should be wearing masks and was told that the scientific advice was that there was ‘no point’ and had ‘very little effect on the spread of Covid’.
This was all part of a wider culture of not adhering to any rules. No 10 was like an island oasis of normality. Operational notes were sent out from the security team to be mindful of the cameras outside the door, not to go out in groups and to social distance. It was all a pantomime.
Birthday parties, leaving parties and end of week gatherings all continued as normal. Those responsible for the leadership of No 10 failed to keep it a safe space and should have set rules from the start that these gatherings should not continue.”
They added it was a year into the pandemic before No 10 set up one-way systems for people walking around it, and screens between desks.
What Johnson said about the gatherings
The report listed a series of occasions in the Commons when Johnson said he personally knew of no rule-breaking, and had been assured none had taken place. Among these were prime minister’s questions on 1 and 8 December 2021, shortly after the Daily Mirror first reported claims about the parties.
At the 8 December session, the then prime minister said he had been “repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no Covid rules were broken”.
The report said that the inquiry asked to see the briefings Johnson received ahead of PMQs sessions, adding: “The briefing pack for 1 December 2021 contains no assurances. The Cabinet Office was unable to provide us with the pack for 8 December.”
It also concluded that Johnson again misled MPs when he “purported to correct the record” in May 2022, and was, additionally, “disingenuous with the committee in ways which amount to misleading”.
What the committee found on the assurances
A lengthy section of the report examines who did in fact assure Johnson that rules had been followed, finding that the only people who could be said “with certainty” to have done that were Jack Doyle and James Slack, both former Daily Mail journalists who worked as Johnson’s head of communications. Slack had previously held the civil service role of official spokesperson.
The report notes: “Both men were concerned chiefly with media-handling and both were, at different times, political appointees of Johnson in that role.”
This, as set out in the report, is another key pointer to the conclusion:
The impression the house would have taken, and we conclude, would have been intended to take from Mr Johnson’s repeated references to assurances was that those assurances had been overarching and comprehensive, and to be given great weight.
In fact, as we have seen, the only assurances that we can be certain were given to Mr Johnson were arrived at in haste based on a press ‘line to take’, were not subject to investigation before either session of PMQs, and did not emanate from senior permanent civil servants or government lawyers but from two media advisers and were based only on their personal recollections.
Whether Johnson’s denials were credible
This is the crux of the report, and the committee’s findings were clear and extremely critical: they found it not credible that Johnson believed what he told MPs, “still less that he could continue to believe them to this day”.
It added: “Someone who is repeatedly reckless and continues to deny that which is patent is a person whose conduct is sufficient to demonstrate intent.”
This was, essentially, a judgment call, something Johnson and his allies see as a flaw with the process. But the report was hugely careful in its logic. The MPs wrote:
We think it highly unlikely on the balance of probabilities that Mr Johnson, in the light of his cumulative direct personal experience of these events, and his familiarity with the rules and guidance as their most prominent public promoter, could have genuinely believed at the time of his statements to the house that the rules or guidance were being complied with.
We think it just as unlikely he could have continued to believe this at the time of his evidence to our committee. We conclude that when he told the house and this committee that the rules and guidance were being complied with, his own knowledge was such that he deliberately misled the house and this committee.
How Johnson was in contempt of the committee
In three ways. First, his resignation letter as an MP on 9 June, a day after he was handed a précis of the report, revealed details of it. They wrote:
It is a contempt of the house to reveal the contents of this document. There are no other physical copies of the document in existence and the document is only made available for inspection under invigilated conditions.
Separately, he “impugned the committee, the integrity of its members, and the impartiality of its staff and advisers”, attacking not only their fairness, but alleging bias.
Finally, Johnson’s resignation letter attacked the committee as a “witch-hunt” and a “kangaroo court”. This happened, the report noted, even though Johnson had written to committee members after his evidence session before them in March to distance himself from such insults, adding: “I have the utmost respect for the integrity of the committee and all its members and the work that it is doing.”
The report said that the subsequent use of such terms in his resignation letter “leaves us in no doubt that he was insincere in his attempts to distance himself from the campaign of abuse and intimidation of committee members. This in our view constitutes a further significant contempt”.
Why Johnson’s offence was seen as especially serious
The report laid out what it said was the extent of Johnson’s culpability in misleading MPs, which it found was very serious. This was because of the former PM’s “repeated and continuing denials of the facts”, for example over the very obvious lack of social distancing at events.
It said Johnson was also to blame for “the frequency with which he closed his mind to those facts”, and the way he tried to “rewrite the meaning of the rules and guidance to fit his own evidence”, such as arguing that imperfect social distancing was better than cancelling an event.
The report also castigated Johnson’s “after-the-event rationalisations”, notably over the assurances he received from others. It added: “His view about his own fixed-penalty notice (that he was baffled as to why he received it) is instructive.”
Why the committee said this was important
The inquiry, they argued, “goes to the very heart of our democracy” given that people elect MPs to not just represent them but hold a government to account. It added: “Our democracy depends on MPs being able to trust that what ministers tell them in the House of Commons is the truth.”
The seven-strong committee said the key issue was failing to correct mistakes, as it was inevitable that ministers make mistakes “and inadvertently mislead”. They added: “When a minister makes an honest mistake and then corrects it, that is democracy working as it should.” What Johnson did, they emphasised, was very different.
How they reached their conclusions
The report stressed how fair and open the committee has sought to be with all evidence given on oath, with all documents submitted to the inquiry passed on to Johnson, with no redaction. Johnson knew the identities of all witnesses.
All evidence was first-hand, including emails, WhatsApp messages and photographs supplied by the government.
Johnson was also given warning of issues that arose from evidence submitted so he could provide his own written evidence in response, which he did. He was then shown the provisional conclusions of the report on 8 June.
The committee said: “There is no matter upon which the committee has reported that Mr Johnson has not had the opportunity to answer or comment upon.”
