Boris Johnson can get angry over Partygate – but he will get no special treatment

Editorial: Loyalists to the ex-PM have made disgraceful attacks on the long-established and balanced procedure to deal with serious allegations against members of the House

The former prime minister Boris Johnson leaves his home in London on Tuesday (PA)

There are two sides, at least, to any story.

As such, it is right and proper for Boris Johnson to publish his defence to the allegations that he lied to parliament. When he appears before the House of Commons committee of privileges to offer his testimony and answer questions, he will have around four hours to account for his actions and explain how he came to mislead parliament; something he now admits to.

That should be ample time for him to make his case. With some £220,000 of taxpayers’ money spent on helping him prepare for the hearing, and the assistance of the distinguished barrister Lord Pannick who will be by his side, Mr Johnson cannot plausibly claim that he’s been treated unfairly.

Yet he and his allies persist with this argument. The defence document that’s now been published invites the committee and the public, not for the first time, to believe that Mr Johnson is a mere victim of circumstance, if not a conspiracy to defame him.

As a shrewd legal/political tactic he has conceded the most obvious and indefensible ground – that he did indeed mislead parliament – the better to defend the more debatable territory of whether it was done knowingly, consciously, recklessly or in any other way.

As he puts it, “when the statements were made, they were made in good faith and on the basis of what I honestly knew and believed at the time” and he “did not intentionally or recklessly mislead the House” and would “never have dreamed of doing so”. That last quip reads a little like a private joke to himself. At times in his statement Mr Johnson sounds hurt, angry and aggrieved; but this may be performative.

He claims, implicitly and true to form, that it was all the fault of others, who advised him that no rules had been broken (note the distinction between rules and guidance), and who had not warned him at the time that they were about to be. Of course, Mr Johnson does not admit the possibility that the reason they acted in this way was that they judged that he wasn’t unduly concerned about these things, and that he might not welcome being offered such advice.

Indeed, Mr Johnson was happy to attend some gatherings himself, including the famous “Abba party”. It was hardly up to a junior special adviser to tell the prime minister that it was illegal.

The widespread and persistent rule-breaking was a result of the culture that Mr Johnson – and arguably his spads, Simon Case, as cabinet secretary, as well as his wife Carrie Johnson – engendered in their workplace and home.

Mr Johnson didn’t care if the rules were broken, and everyone understood that. It would have been otiose for them to have said as much. Hence the lack of evidence of warnings Mr Johnson points to. As Sue Gray wrote in her report: “The events that I investigated were attended by leaders in government. Many of these events should not have been allowed to happen ... it is also the case that some of the more junior civil servants believed that their involvement in some of these events was permitted given the attendance of senior leaders. The senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture.” That judgement has stood the test of time, and, on the substance, has not been challenged – whatever her problematic conversations with Keir Starmer about a potential future role might have been.

Yet the attacks on the committee’s integrity are incessant. This is unfortunate, and counter-productive for a number of reasons. For example, it’s said that the current chair of the committee, Harriet Harman, has already decided his “guilt” and is therefore unfit for the role. Yet the chair of this select committee is always by convention a member of the main opposition party, and there are few MPs, of any party, that don’t have an opinion on Partygate.

Ms Harman took the role on, with the unanimous support of the House (which also voted unanimously to refer the matter to the committee), after the regular committee chair, Chris Bryant, had recused himself because of his own partisanship on the matter.

Ms Harman has served in the Commons since 1982, is widely respected, is capable of weighing evidence as it changes, and presides over a committee with a majority (four out of seven members) of Conservatives. No MP, not even the mother of the House, Ms Harman, has a veto on proceedings and there is a powerful urge to reach unanimity. Whatever is decided will be consensual.

There are claims that those four Conservative members are coming under pressure from party members loyal to Mr Johnson, which is improper and has been condemned by Rishi Sunak and the leader of the Commons, Penny Mordaunt.

This is a disgraceful attack on the long-established and balanced procedure to deal with serious allegations against members of the House. The committee’s personnel (with one exception) and its procedures are the same as for all other MPs under investigation.

In the end, it will be for the Commons as a whole to decide to approve, amend or reject the recommendation of the committee. There will be a debate, and in the past, occasionally, mild attempts have been made legitimately and openly to moderate a committee’s sanction.

The strong convention, though, has always been that the recommendations of the committee are simply accepted in full as a matter of course. Just for a change, Mr Johnson should not benefit from any special treatment, and he should advise his supporters to stop bullying the committee.