Taxpayers are being billed up to £245,000 to cover the cost of Boris Johnson’s Partygate inquiry lawyers. He is facing growing calls to cover the legal costs himself, as the bill for his defence team increased this week for a second time.
The BBC has learned the Treasury did not sign off the decision to use public money to pay the bill. The Treasury’s spending rulebook says its consent should always be sought for costs “which set precedents, are novel, contentious or could cause repercussions elsewhere in the public sector”.
The BBC asked the Cabinet Office if this would apply to Mr Johnson’s legal bills, in a freedom of information (FOI) request. We were told the Treasury was not required to approve all spending decisions.
The Cabinet Office and a source close to Mr Johnson argued there is a long-standing precedent that former ministers are supported with legal representation.
But former senior civil servants disputed this, telling the BBC that it would not normally apply to parliamentary inquiries, like the one into Mr Johnson. “Payment of legal fees to the former prime minister in these circumstances would seem to set a precedent and is certainly contentious, so looks on the face of it to meet the test to require Treasury approval,” said Alex Thomas, a former top civil servant and director of the Institute for Government think tank. “I’m surprised that the payments were made at all - but also that they were signed off in this way.”
The government has cited legal support given to former ministers during public inquiries into the Grenfell Tower fire, the BSE disease outbreak in cattle, and infected blood products as examples of precedents. But these were statutory public inquires initiated by the government, rather than political parliamentary inquiries carried out by MPs.
The last former minister to be investigated by a parliamentary committee for misleading Parliament was former Labour MP and transport secretary Stephen Byers in 2005.
The Byers Enquiry
Mr Byers was investigated by the standards committee over allegations he misled MPs over the collapse of British railway infrastructure operator Railtrack.
In 2006, the committee cleared Mr Byers of lying to MPs about Railtrack, but told him to apologise for giving an “untruthful” answer.
During the four-month inquiry, Mr Byers appeared in front of MPs to give evidence, as Mr Johnson did in March this year.
But unlike Mr Johnson, Mr Byers did not have any legal representation - taxpayer funded or otherwise - during the parliamentary inquiry, nor was he offered any by the government.
More recently, Dominic Raab, the former deputy prime minister, paid his own legal fees during a bullying inquiry.
The greed of Boris Johnson and the preference to use others’ money rather than spend his own knows no bounds … 
