Lying liars gonna lie.
The Commons privileges found Johnson committed five serious offences:
1. Deliberately misleading the Commons
2. Deliberately misleading the privileges committee
3. Breaching confidence (by leaking part of the report in advance)
4. “Impugning” the committee, and thus parliamentary processes
5. Complicity in a “campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee”.
The report said he did this by:
- Saying guidance was followed fully at No 10, and that this had been the case when he attended gatherings.
- Failing to tell the Commons about his own knowledge of gatherings where rules or guidance was broken.
- 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.
- Saying he could not answer questions before the issues had been investigation by Sue Gray, the senior civil servant who initially reported on the parties, when he already had personal knowledge he did not reveal.
- Purporting to correct the record, but instead continued to mislead, and also misleading the committee with continued denials.
- 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.
If Johnson had not resigned as an #MP, the committee would have recommended a 90-day suspension from #parliament
