Susanna Reid has slammed Boris Johnson for using "every excuse in the book" over Partygate.
The Good Morning Britain presenter fumed at the former Prime Minister for using all the excuses ahead of him facing the Commons Privileges Committee today, as part of its probe into whether he lied to MPs over the parties at Downing Street.
Ahead of today's appearance, a 52-page dossier was published where Mr Johnson tried to shift blame onto his aides, accused the media of "weaponising" pictures of him drinking and joking with colleagues, and moaned that no one sang him Happy Birthday at a surprise do he received a police fine for as he tried to defend his actions.
Speaking on the ITV breakfast show today, she said: "We’ll finally hear in detail his defence over Partygate, the scandal where numerous gatherings were held at No. 10. He seems to use every single excuse in the book. The first excuse is that the committee itself is “unfair” and that they’re all biased, so first he wants to discredit the committee.
"The second thing is he says, that 'no one warned me that these were rule-breaking gatherings, but the people that did warn me – because he acknowledges actually that he was warned – you can’t believe them because they’re trying to discredit me."
If you can't see the poll, click here
She added: "Dominic Cummings has a problem with me, so if he says he warned me, you can’t trust him, so I wasn’t warned except by people who did warn me, but you can’t believe them.' The third thing he says was, 'We did follow the rules.'"
She fumed at the former Prime Minister for inferring there were "special exemptions" for the rules.
"So he believes there was a special exemption in the rules for moral-boosting gatherings. I wonder how many work places and how many families wish that they’d known that in the rules you could legitimately say it was important for moral that you held gatherings and said thank you to people and toasted them and had wine and had cheese and gave gifts and perhaps had a quiz and a Secret Santa. I think a lot of people would think that went reasonably necessary for work, to having a bit of a knees-up," she said.
"And then he says, he didn’t realise any of these things were breaking the rules apart from the one that did break the rules because he got a fixed penalty notice for it, but that’s all a bit of a mystery to him - he doesn’t understand it."
She concluded: "Even when the police determined that he broke the rules, he doesn’t understand why he broke the rules. It’s absolutely remarkable. The icing on the cake, the cherry on the top of the birthday cake is, 'We can’t have been breaking the rules because we had a photographer there, and if we knew we were breaking the rules why would we have had a photographer there."
