Johnson’s career will end with a whimper, not a bang
There is going to be quite a circus on 22 March. The committee of privileges has listed five hours of evidence from Boris Johnson, from 2pm to 7pm. At the same time, MPs in the Commons chamber will be debating Rishi Sunak’s Windsor deal that tries to clear up the
mess that the former prime minister left behind in Northern Ireland. It seems straightforward to predict what will happen in the parallel dramas, although anything involving the lord of chaos, as Dominic Cummings called him, requires us to expect the unexpected.
Even so, I will predict that Johnson will repeat what he said when the committee published the “principal issues to be raised with Mr Johnson” two weeks ago, namely that it is clear that “what I have been saying about this matter from the beginning has been vindicated”.
He will claim, as he claimed two weeks ago: “There is no evidence that I was at any stage advised by anyone, whether a civil servant or a political adviser, that an event would be against the rules or the guidance before it went ahead.” The committee is unlikely to waste much time on this because there does indeed seem to be no record of anyone having explicitly warned him, however sceptical we may be about the completeness of the record.
The committee is more likely to focus on the other claim that he made, which was that “there is no evidence that I was later advised that any such event was contrary to requirements”. That is obviously untrue, as we all know that the police decided that the rules were broken, and Johnson accepted that he broke the law. The question is when he knew that the rules had been broken, and whether he “failed to update parliament in a timely manner” – something else for which he again claims that there is no evidence.
Slowly, the waters of indifference will close over the head of a temporary prime minister
On and on the word games will go. In the end, I think the committee is likely to conclude that he didn’t know he was misleading parliament because he tried not to find out. He didn’t ask whether what he did was within the rules because he didn’t want to hear the answer. And he didn’t try to find out about other gatherings that he hadn’t attended in case someone told him.
The likely verdict of the committee, therefore, is that he was reckless as to the truth of what he said in the Commons. When he first told parliament, on 1 December 2021, “all guidance was followed in No 10”, he could have been taken by surprise. But when he repeated the claim a week later, saying that he had been “repeatedly assured that the rules were not broken”, he had had time to find out what had happened and what the rules were.
I think the committee will require him to apologise but will refrain from imposing a severe enough penalty to open him up to a recall petition and a by-election in Uxbridge. I gain no sense from my sources that Harriet Harman, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, is “out to get” Johnson. On the contrary, she and her fellow committee members seem keen to take their quasi-judicial role seriously and will be most unlikely to go beyond the committee’s cautious legal advice. In any case, Harman, as chair, has a say only if a vote is tied among the other members of the seven-member committee.
The majority of the committee, four of its members, are Conservative MPs. They are independent-minded, and likely to be more so after a grassroots campaign by Johnson supporters to try to influence them, but they are unlikely to want to see an exprime minister brought low. I predict that Johnson will eventually receive a gentle telling-off, which he will absolutely hate, but that will be the end of it.
Meanwhile, on 22 March, MPs will vote overwhelmingly to put right the bodge job he made of post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland. There will be no great rebellion on the Tory back benches at the head of which Johnson could place himself. Slowly, the waters of indifference will close over the head of a
temporary prime minister who served his purpose and was then discarded.
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