Victory of the Marsupials

And here we all are at last. The 30,000-word diatribe which will make for a shredder's field day in Westminster next week has finally been published. If nothing else it will make for a lovely supply of toilet paper for some others.

I will try to keep this brief.

The intention of my piece is not to convince you whether Boris Johnson lied or not. I suspect many people made up their mind on that 18 months ago when these allegations first emerged. The intention of this piece is to highlight some of the more extreme excrescences from the report, some of the incredibly bizarre conclusions and suggestions, and - most importantly - why I believe MPs should reject the recommendations when it comes to a vote on Monday.

The first thing to note is that "illegal" does not appear in the report once. "Unlawful" appears four times - twice in direct quotes from Boris Johnson. This report, clearly, was written by a lawyer. This looks like it was a deliberate attempt to avoid being transparently in conflict with the Met Police's investigation; the rest of the report does do so, but since it does not outwardly use those terms it suggests the editors got their digital red pens in order before publishing. (Notably, they didn't do this with an earlier evidence bundle and accidentally leaked a bunch of confidential email addresses by mistake. I can corroborate this because I happened to notice that myself before it was taken down.)

It is important to note the only thing Boris Johnson was ever penalised for by the Metropolitan Police (and Rishi Sunak, for that matter) was a surprise birthday celebration, which, in the eyes of many, is the least egregious "event" that occurred, so for this to be the one event where Johnson's attendance was unlawful - in his words - "boggled my mind".

In any case, as I have said before, this is not about trying to convince you about him lying to the House or otherwise. But it is an important pretext.

Where I have concerns are as follows:

 

1. Criticism of criticism

The Owen Paterson affair, whereby MPs voted against the Standards Committee's recommendation to suspend Owen Paterson for lobbying offences, should have led to reform of the Standards and Privileges Committees. It didn't. Once a matter is referred by the House to the Committee(s) they are given a blank cheque to do as they see fit, it seems. MPs have no way to express concerns about how the Committee conducts itself, the manner in which they are operating, the line of questioning taken in oral evidence - anything. They get a motion to accept the report or otherwise.

"from the outset of this inquiry there has been a sustained attempt, seemingly co-ordinated, to undermine the Committee’s credibility and, more worryingly, that of those Members serving on it. The Committee is concerned that if these behaviours go unchallenged, it will be impossible for the House to establish such a Committee to conduct sensitive and important inquiries in the future. [...] We will be making a Special Report separately to the House dealing with these matters."

This suggests that criticism of how the Committee has operated is to be censured, and I think that is fundamentally wrong. A Select Committee cannot be prosecutor, judge, and jury with a blank cheque as they currently are. MPs who have expressed concerns about the committee throughout the process - on all sides - must be allowed to be heard.

2. Does the Punishment fit the Crime? 

 

The committee recommend (essentially) that Boris Johnson be banned from Westminster and he ought to have been suspended for 90 days. That's three times as long as Margaret Ferrier deliberately breaking Covid rules to board a train. That's nearly twice as long as Rob Roberts's sexual offences. I'm not sure lying - however serious - can be considered worse than sex offences, but yet the two SNP MPs on the committee wanted Boris Johnson expelled - EXPELLED! - from Parliament for life. If that is not a witch-hunt, I simply don't know what is.

So let us consider the "crime". The crime is, allegedly, that he lied to the House, in the view of the committee. That's all. He didn't murder anyone. He didn't deliberately infect anyone with Covid. He didn't rape anyone. He didn't make unwanted sexual advances on junior staffers. No, he said some words which (the Committee believes) were deliberately untrue.

If you believe that merits permanent expulsion from the House and sexual offences don't, then I simply think you should give your head a wobble.

3. The suggestion that we shouldn't have "waited for Sue Gray"

One of the weirdest conclusions in the report is the suggestion that Boris Johnson should not have told MPs to wait for the Gray Report, and should have prejudiced it:

"Mr Johnson [...] misled the House [...] when he gave the impression that there needed to be an investigation by Sue Gray before he could answer questions."

Frankly, I am baffled by this conclusion. To preclude the result of a Cabinet Office inquiry, much of which was subject to Police investigations, would have been sub judice. A little bit of insider trading here, but the Speaker of the House, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has been extremely careful on the matter of sub judice topics. Indeed, even today I received an email (as a listed member of staff) from the Table Office looking to query about a question my boss has tabled, cautioning him not to refer to ongoing Police investigations and matters. (I am not the Parliamentary Assistant, so I have no idea what said question is.)

I am sure of it Boris Johnson was advised not to comment on an ongoing investigation, not just by his lawyers, but likely by the Police and Sue Gray herself. The Committee's suggestion that therefore saying "wait for Sue Gray" was misleading the House is truly, truly bizarre.

4. The suggestion that Boris Johnson lied to the Committee

This is an incredibly serious allegation. To lie under oath is a criminal offence in a court of law. However, no evidence is presented in the report to this extent. The entire extent of the suggestion he lied to the Committee is that when he said he was "repeatedly" assured, they wanted, er, a more accurate and specific definition of what "repeatedly" meant, and thus they have selectively chosen to define it in a way not consistent with the dictionary.

If I were an MP I would not accept this report for these specific reasons.

Parties, Conspiracies, and Wine-Time Fridays: thoughts on "Partygate"

"If the poll tax was the reason she fell, Europe was the reason she wasn't able to get up again."

Modern-day commentators like to say that the poll tax is the reason why Margaret Thatcher was forced from office in 1990. The reality was it was not the big poll tax, it was the straw of Howe's resignation over Europe that broke the camel's back. Likewise with Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, the actual reason for their resignation will not be that which the public remembers. For many, Liz Truss had to go because of the growth plan and the fallout. In reality it was a series of political messes including a total fuss on whipping on both the Public Order Bill and a Labour opposition motion on fracking.

It is important to state that "partygate" (a horrid term) is not why Boris Johnson was forced from office. It was a coup instigated by Rishi Sunak over an error of judgement Johnson had made in a reshuffle some five months earlier by appointing Chris Pincher to a deputy whip. Sunak tries to slither away from partygate, for he was fined for his misdemeanours too, so could not cite partygate as a factor.

As I write this we are around 16 hours away from the most hotly-anticipated committee appearance of the year (oh the joys of being in the "bubble"!) and Boris Johnson's submission to the privileges committee has finally been published, nearly 24 hours after it was submitted.

I have been very critical of Sue Gray in recent weeks and I believe her conduct has been shameful, unbecoming of a civil servant in speaking to Labour whilst working at DLUHC. Unfortunately the media (and therefore the public) only link her with partygate. I do not believe, at this stage, she compromised partygate. What she may have compromised is the Social Housing (Regulation) and Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bills, one of which I have a vested interest in, which is why it is hugely important Starmer and/or Gray reveal when she began talking to Labour. It is, admittedly, a very SW1A story, but the Gray affair with Labour is not about partygate. I hope I have made that crystal clear.

Taking Johnson's statement in conjunction with the Gray report there does appear to be a clear and consistent version of events that seems to back Boris Johnson up.

- The Covid-19 procedures at No10 were different to all other workplaces;
- Anything Johnson attended he clearly did not believe was a "party";
- The evidence proves Johnson was told, repeatedly, that no rules were broken with respect to anything he didn't attend;
- Advisors and civil servants have serious questions to answer.

I want to explore each of these in turn.

This first point is crucial. 

The amount of groupthink that went on, in both the Gray report and Johnson's defence submission, is extraordinary. Johnson's riposte to the committee's suggestion that rule breaches should have been "obvious" plays into this, perhaps more so than Johnson and his lawyers think. As Johnson highlights, if it were "obvious" that rules were being broken, particularly in respect of 19 June 2020 (the surprise birthday sandwiches, the only event for which the Met fined both Johnsons and Rishi Sunak), we are talking about not the failure of one person but that of dozens including the Number 10 photographer and the people who briefed it to The Times for the following day's edition. Number 10 was, for obvious reasons, a workplace allowed to stay open during the pandemic lockdowns, even in the first lockdown when a lot of places shut their doors. Johnson has highlighted in his submission the workplace guidance, as applied to Number 10. Given the layout of the building social distancing was not always viable: having visited Number 10 myself for work reasons last year, this is not a surprise to me. Indeed, it's a great spot by his lawyers that found the guidance said social distancing was an "objective" rather than a rule. There has also been nothing found to have been illegal in the use of alcohol at desks, although Gray criticised this culture in her report.

This therefore suggests that the lines between what was legal and illegal, lawful and unlawful somewhat blurred. I would like to put that question to key workers who worked in the first lockdown. My ex-boyfriend is one such person. If a No10 official pulls the wine out of a cupboard and asks everyone to have a glass at their desks as a toast to a colleague leaving, or a major accomplishment, is that unlawful? Is that illegal? The Metropolitan Police didn't seem to think so.

It is sufficiently blurry to lend credibility to the suggestion Johnson did not attend a "party" at any point. Indeed, he was not fined for anything outside of the surprise birthday - I have always said this was the least egregious event so for him to be fined for this and nothing else has always struck me as odd. It is a point Johnson has also raised in his defence, that no rationale has ever been provided by the Met for why some people were fined for a certain event and not other people, and vice versa, although he stops short of disputing the fine.

Regardless, that is not what the committee's investigation is about.

These arguments about what was legal, what was illegal, what was lawful, what was unlawful - that's a matter for the Metropolitan Police and their investigation concluded last year. Insofar as they are concerned, the door on this affair is now closed and there is no suggestion of any further criminal sanctions for Boris Johnson, Carrie Johnson, Rishi Sunak, or anybody else.

It is only the Privileges Committee, egged on by the media, that is keeping this matter open. One consistent factor across this affair is just how long this has taken. We are talking some 15 months since the initial reports of these events were published by the Daily Mirror and 11 months since the committee was asked to investigate whether Johnson lied to the House.

The legality is important as it provides background and context into what Johnson knew when he made statements to the House, the veracity of which is the subject of the Committee's investigation - no more, no less.

For politicians, lying to Parliament, especially the House of Commons, is the worst offence you can make. You are expected to resign any frontbench post and the House may decide to recommend your suspension from the House outright for a number of days. The Recall of MPs Act, a major coalition reform, could, if the suspension is long enough, instigate a petition to force a by-election in Boris Johnson's constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Ironically, the Conservatives know all this to their cost with a complete cock-up involving Owen Paterson in October 2021. (Paterson denied the paid lobbying charges laid at him by the Standards Committee and the Government decided it didn't agree with them either so told its MPs to vote against a suspension so the case could be reopened. Ultimately this backfired drastically but has led to the beginnings of reforming the committee.) Resultantly, Rishi Sunak is right to make any findings against Boris Johnson a free vote - i.e. one that he is not going to "whip".

It plays into the groupthink regarding the rules and guidance more generally that Johnson states in his defence he and his team did not even consider this matter for PMQs on 1 December 2021. He admits therefore that he was surprised when Keir Starmer chose the initial party reports as his main line of attack: they expected him to talk about Omicron. The piecemeal way in which the Mirror, ITV, and the Guardian opted to drip-feed evidence not only meant Starmer only asked about the 18 December 2020 party (Johnson was not involved in this event in any way and it is (or at least should be) generally accepted he has no personal culpability for it).

The WhatsApp records Johnson provides, as well as a transcript of then Director of Communications Jack Doyle's interview with Sue Gray, suggests either Doyle and James Slack (then "Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson" and essentially deputy DCom) lied to Boris Johnson that no rules were broken or that Doyle was mistaken in believing no rules were broken.

No documentary evidence has ever been provided that Johnson was told that anything was wrong and I want to take this opportunity to criticise the way the media have acted. The media have seized on out-of-context quotations and sought to make a political soap opera out the affair. Much attention was focused on Martin Reynolds' comment that they "got away with it" regarding the "bring your own booze" event on 20 May 2020 but this comment is in relation to communications management and is discussed extensively in the Gray report, Lee Cain explicitly saying he is sure it's legal, but doesn't look good and ultimately this is a key point for the public at large: it is not about what they did and whether it was legal or not; it is about how it looks to them.

The piecemeal way the left-wing media broke new developments in the story suggests someone either had a large file they passed to the Mirror/Guardian/ITV, or given three organisations were getting exclusives, I believe the leaker themselves was doing the piecemealing. It is a common trick which has been used in journalism and is partly why large-scale leaks don't tend to create a huge media storm. The best example of historical precedent here is the MPs' expenses scandal. In early May 2009 the Telegraph was given the complete list of MPs' expenses claims, which included well-publicised events such as moat cleaning, new TVs, dog food, et cetera. Rather than dump a huge file on an unsuspecting public, they drip-fed the coverage over several weeks which allowed more and more "fresh" outrage. The Telegraph, at the time of writing, are doing a similar thing with Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages: if one were to publish all 100,000 of them in one go the Telegraph would be relying on the media picking up on their own narratives, rather than controlling the narrative themselves.

This allowed one person to control the narrative on partygate, clearly taking Number 10 by surprise: as proved by the fact no documentation has ever been discovered that warned Boris Johnson of wrongdoing.

Resultantly, insofar as the committee's investigation is concerned, the only conclusion can be that this statement was truthful as he knew it to be at the time (my emphasis). It relates to the Allegra Stratton video, on which I will expand more in due course:

I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no covid rules were broken. That is what I have been repeatedly assured. 

 - Boris Johnson, 8 December 2021
(Hansard)

This is one of the statements the committee wants to investigate and the evidence suggests, conclusively in my mind, this statement from Johnson is not a lie. The only person who disputes this is the discredited Dominic Cummings, who - regardless of his backstabbing and openly-Sunak-coup-supporting machinations - has been challenged repeatedly to prove his statement he did warn Johnson about the events, but has so far refused to do so, suggesting such evidence does not exist. He insists it does - if so, he must bring it to the committee's attention or the committee must assume it does not exist.

The other answer to Parliament that the committee want to investigate is this:

Catherine West: Will the Prime Minister tell the House whether there was a party in Downing Street on 13 November?

Boris Johnson: No, but I am sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.

8 December 2021
(Hansard) 

In his submission to the committee Johnson admits this is not his finest ever answer at PMQs, to put it mildly. As outlined above, the correct answer to this, objectively, is it depends on what one calls a "party" and it is equally clear that Number 10 officials did not consider leaving drinks a "party" at any point although many "outside" might well do. Is the suggestion that Johnson was expected to know that? The committee seem to think so, but as outlined above Downing Street clearly thought not.

There is, however, one question that remains unanswered, and cannot be answered by Boris Johnson or any politician. It is the Allegra Stratton and Ed Olding internal video of 22 December 2020, in which Olding, playing the role of a journalist, asks Stratton about the events of 18 December 2020, to which they laugh at each other. (By way of background, Stratton was hired as a US-style press secretary, and this was a "dry run" of such a press conference, but the idea was later dropped. Stratton remained on in a new role relating to COP26 but resigned after this leak.)

The video apparently undermines the central claim that no one thought any rules were being broken at any point. There are only three possibilities for what happens now:

- Stratton/Olding told Doyle/Slack/Reynolds at the time and Doyle/Slack/Reynolds hid this from Johnson;

I do not believe this to be likely, unless Reynolds and co. have also lied to the committee and Sue Gray, but this latter suggestion is not only implausible, it is also potentially illegal. They would have known they cannot lie in formal submissions to Gray, lest they lose their jobs at the very least. 

I honestly don’t think that anyone who was in that room was breaking any rules. They were with their colleagues who they sat with all day every day for 12 hours. Were there additional elements to that? Yes. That was a reflection of the specific circumstances of the end of the year. Everyone in the office knew that they were public servants and wouldn’t have done it if they thought they were breaking rules.

- James Slack, 10 December 2021
(submission to Gray, as cited in Johnson, 2023: 35). 

- Stratton/Olding/others hid their rule-breaking from Doyle/Slack/Reynolds and lied to them;

This is the likeliest option and provides reasoning for why Stratton jumped at the first opportunity. However, much of the public would consider this unlikely that the rule-breaking was somehow widespread but kept from political advisors in Jack Doyle, James Slack, and Martin Reynolds. It is, however, the most likely option.

- Stratton, Olding, Doyle, Reynolds, Slack, and Johnson were all "in on it" and tried to cover it all up.

The last option is unlikely. Number 10 staff are not political appointees (largely speaking) but are civil servants, many of whom it is no secret didn't think much of Johnson and would have liked to see him go. If the civil servants ever suspected Johnson was withholding anything you could be sure it would be leaked to the press. That this didn't happen suggests it is unlikely there was an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy.

The committee, in my view, must rule that Johnson did not lie to the House.

----
Further reading:

Gray, S., 2022. Findings of Second Permanent Secretary's Investigation into Alleged Gatherings on Government Premises During Covid Restrictions. London: Cabinet Office.
Hansard HC Deb. vol.705 cols.371-2, 8 December 2021.
Hansard HC Deb. vol.705 col.379, 8 December 2021.
Johnson, A. B. D. P., 2023. In the Matter Referred to the House of Commons Committee of Privileges on 21 April 2022. London: House of Commons Committee of Privileges.