Boris Johnson has admitted the Partygate scandal was a “totally miserable experience” as he was branded a “habitual liar” by users of the influential Mumsnet site.
The Prime Minister said he was “very, very surprised and taken aback” to be fined by the Metropolitan Police for attending a birthday party in his honour in June 2020.
Johnson “apologised very much” for his behaviour, but insisted he would not resign.
He said: “I have thought about all these questions a lot. I can’t see how it would be responsible right now, given everything that is going on, to abandon the project I embarked on.”
The Prime Minister was grilled over the scandal by Mumsnet users on Wednesday with one member submitting a question asking him how the public could trust him as a “habitual liar”.
Johnson countered the claim but confessed: “I can totally see how infuriating it is that people like me were not fulfilling the letter of the rules ourselves. I totally understand that.”
Asked about the political pressure he is now under, Johnson acknowledged: “I’m not going to deny the whole thing hasn’t been a totally miserable experience for people in government.”
The PM used the interview to rehearse his excuses for attending other lockdown events in Downing St which he was not fined for but will be question on by a Commons committee investigating if he misled MPs.
He said: “I genuinely believed that what I was doing, was saying goodbye to hard-working staff who had been doing their best to help people during the pandemic.
“I thought what I was doing was right for a leader in any circumstances, to thank people for their service. This was a time when we had to keep morale high, and the whole place was under huge pressure.
“I make these points in explanation but not to minimise peoples’ sense that we got it wrong and should have done better.”
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Johnson also protested that he did not eat any birthday cake at the June 2020 event which saw him receive a fixed penalty notice for a breach of his Covid laws.
“If you’re talking about that miserable event that appeared on the front page of newspapers, no cake was consumed by me – I can tell you that much,” he spluttered.
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