14 months, 108 pages, 50,000 words: Details of the Partygate report

14 months, 108 pages, 50,000 words: Full details of the scathing Partygate report that has been roundly rejected by Boris Johnson and his supporters

• In a scathing report over 108 pages, Boris Johnson was criticised by MPs 
• Read more: Sunak faces implosion as loyalists vow to vote AGAINST report 

The parliamentary ‘Partygate’ report published this morning is the longest, most comprehensive and most controversial verdict yet on the gatherings that took place in Downing Street during lockdown.

A Cabinet Office inquiry by civil servant Sue Gray, published just over a year ago, was only 60 pages long and took less than six months to finish.

And the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Hillman, which led to 126 fines being handed out for breaches of Covid laws, was completed in less than four months.

By contrast, the privileges committee has spent 14 months looking solely into whether or not Boris Johnson misled the Commons about the events dubbed Partygate.

In a scathing report totalling 50,000 words over 108 pages, which has been roundly rejected by the former prime minister and his supporters, this is what the seven MPs said.

The privileges committee has spent 14 months looking solely into whether or not Boris Johnson misled the Commons about the events dubbed Partygate (file image)

MPs triggered a political earthquake today by finding Boris Johnson lied to the Commons over Partygate

A FAIR HEARING?

In the face of sustained criticism that the committee was dominated by Mr Johnson’s opponents and did not treat him fairly, the MPs went out of their way to insist they had done things by the book.

They pointed out that the whole House of Commons ordered the inquiry on April 21, 2022, ‘without a vote against’.

And they said they did their best to ‘show our workings’, setting out the processes last July including taking advice from eminent lawyers and parliamentary experts.

The report addressed the question ‘Is the committee Labour-dominated?’ by pointing out that it comprised four Conservatives, two from Labour and one SNP MP.

And, thanks to the convention that the committee’s chairman does not vote, the ‘actual voting strength of the parties’ was 4-1 to the Tories.

The Q&A section went on to deny common complaints that it had ‘moved the procedural goalposts’, ‘been on fishing expeditions’ and subjected Mr Johnson to ‘highly partisan’ cross-examination.

SCENE OF THE CRIMES

As part of their investigation, the MPs not only visited No 10 Downing Street but even measured the rooms where illicit gatherings had taken place during lockdown, to see if social distancing could have been maintained.

After 14 months of investigation, the Privileges Committee concluded in a bombshell report that the ex-PM ‘deliberately misled’ Parliament

The report revealed: ‘We paid a visit to No 10 to inspect for ourselves the locations of the various gatherings to which Mr Johnson referred in the House.’

Part of this involved trying to work out if the then PM would have a ‘clear line of view’, allowing him to see a party taking place in the press office when he went up to his flat from the Cabinet Room.

They also appeared to have taken precise measurements of the dimensions of the room where a leaving do took place.

‘HE CLOSED HIS MIND TO THE TRUTH’

The bulk of the report considered what Mr Johnson knew about the six most notorious Downing Street parties, what he had been told by his advisers and then what he told the Commons and the committee about them.

It concluded that given he had attended five of the gatherings, and had led attempts to get the country to abide by lockdown restrictions, it was ‘highly unlikely’ he could have ‘genuinely believed’ Covid rules and guidance were being complied with.

Boris Johnson swears on the bible to take the oath to tell the truth while giving evidence Privileges Committee 

The bulk of the report considered what Mr Johnson knew about the six most notorious Downing Street parties (picture of the then Prime Minister at a party in 2020) 

The MPs dismissed Mr Johnson’s ‘disingenuous’ attempt to claim in the ill-tempered public hearing this March that ‘imperfect’ social distancing was permissible, as well as his belief which ‘has no reasonable basis’ that workplace leaving drinks were essential.

They were equally withering about his later explanations of his fateful assertions to the House when the Partygate scandal broke: that ‘all guidance was followed completely in No 10’ and that he had been ‘repeatedly assured’ that ‘the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times’.

The committee said the House would have taken these assurances from the prime minister seriously, without realising they were ‘arrived at in haste’, had not been investigated by senior civil servants or lawyers and were based only on the ‘personal recollections’ of two media advisers.

The report said Mr Johnson was trying to mount an ‘ex post facto justification’ of his PMQs assertions that was ‘false’.

It found he repeatedly misled the House, even when he attempted to correct the record months later, and then misled the committee.

Although the report did not directly state that Mr Johnson lied, it repeatedly used the phrase that he ‘closed his mind to the truth’.

It concluded: ‘In deliberately misleading the House, Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt.’

A NEW WHISTLEBLOWER

In another twist, the committee revealed new evidence that parties continued unabated in No 10 and measures to limit the spread of Covid were not implemented for more than a year into the pandemic.

A dossier of additional material published yesterday included a short but damning statement from an unnamed ‘No 10 official’ who said they had worked in Downing Street since 2018.

The written evidence said that ‘Wine Time Fridays’ were in the calendar every Friday at 4pm for press officers to gather ‘to have drinks’ before Covid struck, and ‘continued throughout’ while ‘social distancing was not enforced’.

The report included some new evidence, including testimony from one official who said ‘Wine Time Fridays’ were a diaried event in No10 throughout the pandemic

The Commons Privileges Committee inquiry has been chaired by Labour’s Harriet Harman 

They went on: ‘This was all part of a wider culture of not adhering to any rules. No 10 was like an island oasis of normality.’

It was claimed that ‘birthday parties, leaving parties and end-of-week gatherings all continued as normal’, while it was more than a year into the pandemic ‘that No 10 set up a one-way system and desk divider screens’.

JUDGE AND JURY

It also emerged yesterday that Mr Johnson’s top barristers had written a third, previously unpublished, legal opinion on the case – accusing the committee’s MPs of acting as judge and jury.

Lord Pannick KC and Jason Pobjoy told the committee it was unfair that the committee members cross-examined his client but then also got to come up with a punishment for him.

‘If the proceedings adopted by the committee had been conducted by any quasi-judicial body subject to judicial review, we have no doubt that an adverse decision against Mr Johnson would be quashed by the High Court for breaching the requirement central to the appearance of fairness that the judge must not also be the investigator and prosecutor.’

They claimed that the committee’s own legal adviser had made a similar point in a report on the standards committee, saying it should not have the dual role of investigator and decision-maker.

THE ATTACK

Although its verdict on his statements to the Commons and in the oral hearing were damning enough, the committee was even more outraged by Mr Johnson’s recent behaviour.

The MPs said although each page of draft findings sent to his lawyers last week was marked ‘in strict confidence’, within 24 hours he ‘broke the confidentiality of the process’ by revealing the contents of the letter.

The MPs said although each page of draft findings sent to his lawyers last week was marked ‘in strict confidence’, within 24 hours he ‘broke the confidentiality of the process’

And they said he was wrong to criticise the process but also to attack in ‘vitriolic terms’ the integrity of its members, which they branded ‘an attack on our democratic institutions’.

The MPs said this was a further contempt, as was his ‘insincere’ previous attempt to claim he did not support the ‘campaign of abuse and intimidation’ of committee members.

CONCLUSIONS

The former PM would have faced a by-election in his Uxbridge constituency had he not dramatically resigned last Friday, because the committee said ‘we had provisionally agreed to recommend a suspension long enough to engage the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act’.

But the ‘further contempts’ in the days since then meant ‘we would have recommended that he be suspended from the service of the House for 90 days for repeated contempts and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process’.

The committee also recommended ‘he should not be granted a former member’s pass’.

Minutes of its final meeting on Tuesday reveal that the SNP’s Allan Dorans and Labour’s Yvonne Fovargue wanted to go even further and voted for Mr Johnson to face the ultimate sanction – to be ‘expelled from the House’.

Boris Johnson’s furious response to the Privileges Committee in full  

It is now many months since people started to warn me about the intentions of the Privileges Committee. They told me that it was a kangaroo court. They told me that it was being driven relentlessly by the political agenda of Harriet Harman, and supplied with skewed legal advice – with the sole political objective of finding me guilty and expelling me from parliament.

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.

To be frank, when I first heard these warnings, I was incredulous. When it was first proposed that there should be such an inquiry by this committee, I thought it was just some time-wasting procedural stunt by the Labour party.

I didn’t think for one minute that a committee of MPs could find against me on the facts, and I didn’t see how any reasonable person could fail to understand what had happened.

I knew exactly what events I had attended in Number 10. I knew what I had seen, with my own eyes, and like the current PM, I believed that these events were lawful. I believed that my participation was lawful, and required by my job; and that is indeed the implication of the exhaustive police inquiry.

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 (I had lunch at my desk with people I worked with every day).

So when on Dec 1 2021 I told the House of Commons that ‘the guidance was followed completely’ (in Number Ten) I meant it. It wasn’t just what I thought: it’s what we all thought – that we were following the rules and following the guidance completely – notwithstanding the difficulties of maintaining social distancing at all times.

The committee now says that I deliberately misled the House, and at the moment I spoke I was consciously concealing from the House my knowledge of illicit events.

This is rubbish. It is a lie. In order to reach this deranged conclusion, the Committee is obliged to say a series of things that are patently absurd, or contradicted by the facts.

First, they say that I must have known that the farewell events I attended were not authorised workplace events because – wait for it – NO SUCH EVENT could lawfully have taken place, anywhere in this country, under the Committee’s interpretation of covid rules. 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.

But don’t just listen to me. Take it from the Metropolitan Police. The police investigated my role at all of those events. In no case did they find that what I had done was unlawful. Above all it did not cross my mind – as I spoke in the House of Commons – that the events were unlawful.

I believed that we were working, and we were: talking for the main about nothing except work, mainly covid. Why would I have set out, in the Chamber, to conceal my knowledge of something illicit, if that account could be so readily contradicted by others? Why would we have had an official photographer if we believed we were breaking the law?

We didn’t believe that what we were doing was wrong, and after a year of work the Privileges Committee has found not a shred of evidence that we did.

Their argument can be boiled down to: ‘Look at this picture – that’s Boris Johnson with a glass in his hand. He must have known that the event was illegal. Therefore he lied.’

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.

For the Committee now to say that all such events – ‘thank-yous’ and birthdays – were intrinsically illegal is ludicrous, contrary to the intentions of those who made the rules (including me), and contrary to the findings of the Met; and above all I did not for one moment think they were illicit – at the time or when I spoke in the Commons.

The Committee cannot possibly believe the conclusions of their own report – because it has now emerged that Sir Bernard Jenkin attended at least one ‘birthday event’, on Dec 8 2020 – the birthday of his wife Anne – when it is alleged that alcohol and food were served and the numbers exceeded six indoors.

Why was it illegal for me to thank staff and legal for Sir Bernard to attend his wife’s birthday party?

The hypocrisy is rank. Like Harriet Harman, he should have recused himself from the inquiry, since he is plainly conflicted.

The rest of the Committee’s report is mainly a rehash of their previous non-points. They have nothing new of substance to say. They concede that they have found no evidence that I was warned, before or after an event, that it was illegal. That is surely very telling. If we had genuinely believed these events to be unauthorised – with all the political sensitivities entailed – then there would be some trace in all the thousands of messages sent to me, and to which the committee has had access.

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 1 m where there was no alternative – though they refuse to take account of all the other mitigations – including regular testing – that we put in place.

They keep wilfully missing the point. The question is not whether perfect social distancing was maintained at all times in Number ten – clearly that wasn’t possible, as I have said very often. The question is whether I believed, given the limitations of the building, we were doing enough, with mitigations, to follow the guidance – and I did, and so did everyone else.

They grudgingly accept that I was right to tell the Commons that I was repeatedly assured that the rules were followed in respect of the Dec 18 event in the media room, but they try, absurdly and incoherently, to say that the assurances of Jack Doyle and James Slack were not enough to constitute ‘repeated’ assurances – completely and deliberately ignoring the sworn testimony of two MPs, Andrew Griffiths and Sarah Dines, who have also said that they heard me being given such assurances.

Perhaps the craziest assertion of all is the Committee’s Mystic Meg claim that I saw the Dec 18 event with my own eyes. They say, without any evidence whatever, that at 21.58pm, on that date, my eyes for one crucial second glanced over to the media room as I went up to the flat – and that I saw what I recognised as an unauthorised event in progress.

First, the Committee has totally ignored the general testimony about that evening, which is that people were working throughout, even if some had been drinking at their desks. How on earth do these clairvoyants know exactly what was going on at 21.58?

How do they know what I saw? What retinal impressions have they somehow discovered, that are completely unavailable to me? I saw no goings on at all in the press room, or none that I can remember, certainly nothing illegal.

As the Committee has heard, officials were heavily engaged in preparing difficult messaging about the prospect of a No-deal Brexit and a Christmas lockdown.

It is a measure of the Committee’s desperation that they are trying incompetently and absurdly to tie me to an illicit event – with an argument so threadbare that it belongs in one of Bernard Jenkin’s nudist colonies.

Their argument is that I saw this event, believed it to be illegal, and had it in my head when I spoke to the House. On all three counts they are talking out of the backs of their necks. If I did see an illegal event, and register it as illegal, then why was I on my own in this? Why not the Cabinet Secretary, or Sue Gray, or the then Chancellor, who was patrolling the same corridors at the time?

The committee is imputing to me and me alone a secret knowledge of illegal events that was somehow not shared by any other official or minister in Number Ten. That is utterly incredible. That is the artifice.

This report is a charade. I was wrong to believe in the Committee or its good faith. The terrible truth is that it is not I who has twisted the truth to suit my purposes. It is Harriet Harman and her Committee.

This is a dreadful day for MPs and for democracy. This decision means that no MP is free from vendetta, or expulsion on trumped up charges by a tiny minority who want to see him or her gone from the Commons.

I do not have the slightest contempt for parliament, or for the important work that should be done by the Privileges Committee.

But for the Privileges Committee to use its prerogatives in this anti-democratic way, to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination – that is beneath contempt.

It is for the people of this country to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman.

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