He's had his say
Boris Johnson has blasted the Privileges Committee as “beneath contempt” because it had reached a “deranged conclusion” to deliver “what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination”.
They also warned me that most members had already expressed prejudicial views – especially Harriet Harman – in a way that would not be tolerated in a normal legal process. Some alarmists even pointed out that the majority of the committee voted remain and they stressed that Bernard Jenkin’s personal antipathy to me was historic and well-known.
The only exception is the June 19 2020 event, the so-called birthday party, when I and the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak were fined in circumstances that I still find puzzling . This is transparently wrong. I believed, correctly, that these events were reasonably necessary for work purposes. We were managing a pandemic. We had hundreds of staff engaged in what was sometimes a round-the-clock struggle against Covid. Their morale mattered for that fight. It was important for me to thank them.
That is a load of complete tripe. That picture was me, in my place of work, trying to encourage and thank my officials in a way that I believed was crucial for the Government and for the country as a whole, and in a way which I believed to be wholly within the rules.
It is preposterous to say, as the committee does, that people were just too scared to mention concerns to their superiors. Really? Was Simon Case too scared to draw his concerns to my attention? Was Sue Gray or Rishi Sunak? The committee concedes that the guidance permitted social distancing of less than one metre where there was no alternative – though they refuse to take account of all the other mitigations – including regular testing – that we put in place.
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