Ending the party

Parliament should scrutinise PM

BORIS JOHNSON will be hoping the delay to the publication of civil servant Sue Gray’s ‘partygate’ report buys him sufficient time to save his premiership.

Yet the most serious damage has already been done – Downing Street’s ‘bring your own booze parties’, and double standards in lockdown, risks diminishing the reputation of all politicians at a time when trust was already so fragile.

And while the conduct of MPs does merit a Commons debate next week – the ‘egregious’ lobbying by disgraced former minister Owen Paterson preceded the ‘partygate’ revelations – so, too, does the scrutiny, and accountability, of prime ministers, and their office, when their conduct and integrity falls short of the standards expected of them.

None of the current checks appear effective enough when 10 Downing

Street has been brought into such disrepute by a leader who disregards the Nolan principles on public life, ignores his own Ministerial Code, brushes aside his Independent Adviser (Lord Geidt), vacillates over the full release of the Gray report and does not appreciate that misleading Parliament should, in normal times, be a prima facie resignation issue.

And if the public trust is to be regained by MPs – most of whom are extremely conscientious and respectful of their status – then Parliament, and not Downing Street, should take the lead over standards and misconduct in high office,

For, if this becomes the case, it thereby closes the loophole whereby leaders as duplicitous as Mr Johnson to try and act as ‘judge and jury’ when it comes to their own propriety – and scandals like ‘partygate’.