“BoJo” facing his responsibilities. Hair less in battle than usual, cautious but combative, Boris Johnson fought step by step on Wednesday to convince the parliamentary inquiry committee of his good faith which pressed him with questions for three hours in the partygate affair. At the opening of the session, the stakes were posed by the chair of the committee, Labor MP Harriet Harman. The inquiry must determine if “Boris Johnson told the truth” in the House of Commons when he repeated that “all the rules were followed” in Downing Street during the confinement during the Covid-19 epidemic.
“Our democracy depends on confidence in the truth of what ministers say to MPs in parliament,” said Harriet Harman. The members of the commission, four deputies from the conservative majority, three from the opposition, leave their partisan interests “at the door”, she underlines. A clear answer to accusations of bias.
The commission broadcasts videos of Boris Johnson’s repeated assurances to MPs, sometimes in the hubbub of the House of Commons. With his hair recently cut, Boris Johnson listens again, pursed lips, to the sequences which earned him this hearing, then takes an oath while holding an imposing copy of the Bible in both hands. Shoulders forward, mine concentrated, the 58-year-old former Prime Minister repeats the excuses he has made so many times.
“No one sang, the famous cake”
“I am here to tell you, hand on heart, that I did not lie in the House” of Commons, he says. The virus almost cost him his life in 2020. The “partygate” scandal ended up costing him his job. Boris Johnson reverses the conclusions of the interim report, for which it must have been “obvious” in his eyes that the rules had been broken. “If it was obvious to me (…) then it should have been equally obvious to dozens of others, including the country’s highest officials,” he explains. “Including the current Prime Minister” Rishi Sunak, he tackles.
A rival he will oppose in an early afternoon vote, during a brief adjournment, on a key provision of Rishi Sunak’s deal with the European Union on post-Brexit trade in Northern Ireland. Assuring that he did not seek to “cover or conceal anything”, Boris Johnson invokes his “good faith” and the difficulties of observing distancing in the cramped premises of Downing Street. He takes refuge behind the advisers on whom he relied, speaks of “honest error”. As for the surprise birthday which earned him a fine from the police, “nobody sang, the famous cake” struck with the Union Jack “remained in his Tupperware, without my noticing it, and was later found and eaten by my private secretaries”.
Sometimes searching for his words, the former tenant of Downing Street took up arguments already repeated over and over again, hammering home his conviction that these were “work events”. “Holding back is a wonderful thing,” he says repeatedly.
Boris Johnson is questioned about each of the disputed events.
The one held in Downing Street Gardens? It was “implied” that it was a work event, he claims. “People who say we were partying during confinement simply don’t know what they’re talking about,” says Boris Johnson, cooked on his presence at a farewell party. “It was my job,” he explains.
As for the identity of the advisers who assured him that all the rules were followed, Boris Johnson gropes, indicates that he thinks of a name whose anonymity must be preserved. The commission asks that the information be communicated by its lawyers.
Asked about the terms ‘witch hunts’ and puppet court thrown around by his allies, Boris Johnson seeks to distance himself from them, while adding that ‘people will judge for themselves, based on the evidence you have produced, of the correctness of this commission”.