Panel says Johnson misled House

The privileges committee of the House of Commons report on the issue of former British prime minister Boris Johnson misleading the House over parties held at 10 Downing Street during the Covid-19 lockdown is stringent in the strictures it has passed against Johnson. It said in clear language: “We conclude that in deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. 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 (of Commons, lower house of parliament).” The committee had banned Johnson from using the privileges of a former member and prime minister to access the parliament. It is indeed a damning verdict. Parliament will take up the report on Monday. The committee consisted of four Conservatives and three Labour members. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the committee had done its job and there can be no criticism of it.

Johnson, like former United States president Donald Trump, is raging against the committee’s finding. He described it as a “witch hunt”. He defended the parties held at Downing Street and said they were held to thank the staff for their work during the pandemic. Johnson remains unrepentant. He said, “This decision means that no MP is free from vendetta, or expulsion on trumped up charges by a tiny minority who want to see him or her gone from the Commons.”

Johnson is still held to be an influential leader in the Conservative Party even after he has stepped down as prime minister. He has also been planning to return as prime minister and he has not forgiven Rishi Sunak for resigning when the Downing Street party scandal raged, and which in turn turned the tide against Johnson and he was forced to resign. It will not become difficult for Johnson to retrieve his lost political fortune.

Sunak is faced with the challenge of turning around the British economy but it seems that his efforts will be overshadowed by the Johnson soap opera and with Johnson hogging the headlines, and for all the wrong reasons of course, the party’s already battered image will get further dented. It is a different question whether Labour Party is in a position to take advantage of the pathetic condition that the Conservatives find themselves in.

Johnson has been a wilful politician who has fancied himself to be another Churchill, and whose oratorical talents would take him over all the hurdles. And he believed that he was privileged to make mistakes and brush them away because he was the charismatic Churchillian leader. Johnson did experience the Churchill moment when he led the Conservatives to a landslide victory in the 2019 general election over the Brexit question.

But things did not go his way when he himself seriously took ill during the pandemic because of his reckless approach and he was in the ICU for days, creating the possibility of Britain losing its serving prime minister. He survived but the pandemic hit Britain very hard. Sunak as the Chancellor of the Exchequer rolled out a generous economic package to tide over the crisis. But once the pandemic ended and lockdown lifted, it was time for the hard decisions of rolling back the dole and raising the taxes. Sunak stuck to the hard decisions though he lost the first round of the leadership contest to Liz Truss.

But now with the Johnson drama taking centre stage, it will be a tough act for Sunak to convince the people that the Conservatives were doing the right things to get the British economy back on track, and that the hard times will bring easier days ahead.