Boris Johnson announced on Thursday that “this is a dreadful day for MPs and for democracy”. In fact, it was the exact reverse. For the first time, a British former prime minister was found by his colleagues to have misled the House of Commons while he was in office. If Mr Johnson had not already done a runner from parliament, he would have rightly faced a 90-day suspension from it. But that does not make Thursday a dreadful day for democracy. On the contrary. It makes it a day of robust and necessary vindication of British parliamentary democracy against arguably its most unprincipled domestic enemy of modern times. The dreadfulness lay all along in Mr Johnson’s conduct alone.
The privileges committee report proves equal to its task. It took 14 months to compile and runs to 30,000 words and 108 pages. It was launched by an unopposed vote while Mr Johnson was still prime minister. The seven-strong committee was a mix of veterans and younger MPs. It had a Conservative majority, the two most senior of whom were celebrated Brexiters. The inquiry was conducted in a meticulous and fair manner. If the committee Conservatives had chosen to believe Mr Johnson’s version of events in 10 Downing Street during the Covid emergency, and the assurances that he gave MPs about them, they had the votes to win out. Instead, the committee rejected his version unanimously. The only issue on which it was divided was whether to expel Mr Johnson altogether (it voted not to).
Mr Johnson dismissed the report as “complete tripe”, “a charade”, “a lie”, “patently absurd” and “a deranged conclusion”. Such language tells its own story. So does his misogynistic hostility towards the committee chair, Labour’s Harriet Harman. In reality, though, the report was none of the things he claims. It benefits from a patient read. For the most part it is not personally hostile to Mr Johnson, though the tone hardens when it comes to his recent insults against the committee and its members, as a result of which the original suspension was increased. The report is sometimes too generous, assuming greater sensitivity on Mr Johnson’s part to Covid regulatory issues than this lazy, dyed-in-the-wool narcissist seems capable of. There is also a legitimate argument in the report about whether the Commons process is consistent with natural justice. The committee concludes firmly that it is.
On Monday, the Commons will debate the report. There will be a free vote. Less now rests on that than would have been the case if Mr Johnson had not scuttled his own parliamentary career last week. But it will still be a moment of real consequence for parliament, for politics and for the Conservative party in particular. Tory MPs face a choice. Do they stand with parliament or with Mr Johnson? Stand with parliament and some may risk a membership backlash in their constituencies. Stand with Mr Johnson and they help push the party back into the pit from which Rishi Sunak is struggling to extricate it.
MPs of all parties must stand by the committee. By doing so, they will assert that rules matter, that parliament is more important than party and that standards in public life must be rigorous. Mr Johnson behaved as though the electoral system conferred untrammelled power on him to act as he chose, and to breach rules and conventions for his own advantage. He saw the Brexit vote and the 2019 election as a personal mandate, handing him a free pass to fob parliament off with lies and bluster – and to party while others worried and suffered. The diminishing of parliament was – and remains – absolutely central to his egotistical project. Parliament must now turn that around by irrevocably diminishing him.
