I know I will not be alone in watching intently how Conservative MPs are responding to the report on Boris Johnson’s misleading of parliament (and the British public) during Covid (Editorial, 15 June). My treasured 30-year-old son Dom lost his battle with depression, dying by suicide in May 2021. While I have learned, for my own peace of mind, not to attach significance to the timing of Dom’s death, the fact remains that following the “rules” meant I couldn’t offer Dom the opportunity to come home (and so I wasn’t able to provide the support that I’d previously always given to him when he most needed it).
Meet-ups were in London parks, to which I drove from my home town in Thame, Oxfordshire – not exactly straightforward, but doing the right thing is rarely easy. Of course, as a concerned parent, I wanted to swoop him up, but I also recognised the shared responsibility that we had to follow a set of rules designed to safeguard us all.
Johnson set those rules, regularly reminded us what they were and purported to be adhering to them himself. His deceit is sickening, and my heart goes out to all the other members of the British public who are also feeling massive anger towards a leader who had such little regard for people who, in showing an integrity that is frankly utterly alien to him, were not able to properly care for their loved ones when they were most vulnerable.
Esther Stanway-Williams
Thame, Oxfordshire
• Boris Johnson apologised to me “profusely” in parliament on 19 April 2022 about the suffering of all those who lost loved ones during the pandemic, when Keir Starmer quoted my letter in the Guardian (14 April 2022) in which I expressed my anger that, while my family and I obeyed the Covid rules for my wife’s funeral, Johnson “partied his way through them”. The privileges committee report on Johnson’s behaviour now proves beyond any doubt what most of us believed: that Johnson broke his own rules, having parties in Downing Street, and deliberately lied to us all and to parliament time and time again, treating the whole country with contempt.
My grateful and genuine thanks to the committee for their achingly honest and damning report, and for beginning to restore my faith in parliament.
John Robinson
Lichfield
• Boris Johnson now alleges that the privileges committee’s findings are vitiated by Harriet Harman’s longstanding hostility towards him (Boris Johnson: his defence over Partygate report, 15 June).
If Johnson had at any time before the hearings genuinely thought that this might be the case, his legal team, led by Lord Pannick KC, would have been obliged to ask that Harman should stand down, as Chris Bryant had already voluntarily done. Had she declined, Lord Pannick would have had to open the first hearing with a submission that unless she now recused herself, the investigative process would be invalid.
None of this happened. What the law will not do is allow an individual facing a judicial hearing to keep an allegation of bias in their back pocket and produce it only if they lose.
Stephen Sedley
Former lord justice of appeal
• As a clinical psychologist, I am not surprised by your article reporting findings from a survey by Savanta for King’s College London and the BBC, particularly as it looked at beliefs shared on social media and websites (Quarter in UK believe Covid was a hoax, poll on conspiracy theories finds, 13 June).
A “post-truth era” is a bewildering and destabilising place in which to live. If a prime minister, as the most senior representative of British democracy, lies to the nation, is it any wonder that people are drawn to conspiracy theories and authoritarian groups in a desperate search for “truth”? Human beings are prone to create what they fear. In the search for certainties and cohesion, they risk falling into ideological chaos.
Dr Anna Conochie
Sudbury, Suffolk
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