A dastardly plot to save Johnson’s bacon?

At first, it just looked like dumb luck. Less than a year after he was driven from office by his own party, former British prime minister Boris Johnson was getting his final comeuppance. The cross-party Privileges Committee that was created to determine whether he had lied to Parliament issued its report last week, and it was dire.

In essence, it said that Johnson must have known about the more-frequent-thanweekly drinks parties held by his personal staff to celebrate birthdays, people leaving, or simply the fact that it was Friday, because:

a) it was all happening in his own rather large 17th-century residence in Downing Street (British prime ministers live above the shop);

b) there were many personal reports that Johnson himself took part in these events; and

c) he was actually fined by the police for breaking the rules against large social gatherings that were in force during those early Covid times.

The crime was not drinking alcohol, which was never banned. It was getting together in groups at a time when ordinary people were obliged to avoid such groups, not even visiting hospitals to say farewell to dying parents.

Such contempt for ordinary people was damaging the Tory (Conservative Party) brand, as was Johnson’s general incompetence and fecklessness, so eventually the Tories themselves ditched him. But the party is already on his second replacement as prime minister (Rishi Sunak), and Johnson is still hanging around hoping to make a comeback.

The best way to scotch that possibility is the Privileges Committee, because if it finds him guilty of lying to Parliament it can recommend that he be suspended or even expelled from Parliament. That would end his comeback hopes – but there was a last-minute hitch.

Everybody in Parliament knows that Boris Johnson lies all the time. Most other people in the country now know it, too, and only a dwindling minority are still amused or excited by his boyish behaviour and brazen lies. But the committee had to find actual evidence that he had knowingly lied to Parliament.

They seem to have found it, and it looked like he was done for. And then, without any personal effort, Our Hero was free.

Sue Gray is a senior career civil servant who was working in the prime minister’s office as ‘ethics adviser,’ so she was the obvious choice to conduct an inquiry into the allegations of drunken parties in Downing Street. She did so, and indirectly criticized the prime minister for “failures of leadership and judgement.”

There was also the police inquiry, and the formation of the Parliamentary Committee, and above all the revolt by Johnson’s own colleagues. Sue Gray’s report could take perhaps 25 per cent of the credit for bringing Boris down, but no more.

But last week she announced that she was quitting the civil service and taking a job as chief of staff to Labour Party leader Keir Starmer. Shock and horror throughout Whitehall, and the dominant response was a conviction that this would somehow absolve Johnson of his sins.