UK House of Commons Committee of Privileges inquiry - Update - MPs agree that Boris Johnson's allies tried to undermine partygate probe

Controversial: Politics & Govt Politics & Govt: In The News
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Guido understands that following our scoop Nadine Dorries has written to the Clerk of the Privileges Committee, Dr Robin James, about Bernard Jenkin. He has confirmed that he has referred the matter to the Harriet Harman, the chairwoman of the committee. The predator has become the prey…

Following our scoop that Privileges Committee inquisitor Bernard Jenkin attended a birthday drinks party in parliament during lockdown, Boris has sent Guido this statement:

If this is true it is outrageous and a total contempt of parliament.

Bernard Jenkin has just voted to expel me from parliament for allegedly trying to conceal from parliament my knowledge of illicit events.

In reality of course I did no such thing.

Now it turns out he may have for the whole time known that he himself attended an event – and concealed this from the privileges committee and the whole House for the last year.

To borrow the language of the committee, if this is the case, he “must have known” he was in breach of the rules

Why didn’t he say so?

He has no choice but to explain his actions to his own committee, for his colleagues to investigate and then to resign.

Inquisitor Bernard now has questions of his own to answer.

Guido has just got off the phone with Bernard Jenkin. Our conversation was short. We got to the point of the call pretty quickly:

Guido: Cast your mind back to December 8th, 2020 during lockdown, do you remember attending a drinks party in parliament held by Eleanor Laing?

Bernard: I did not attend any drinks parties during lockdown.

Guido: It was your wife’s birthday celebration, are you saying you did not have anything to drink?

Bernard: I don’t recall.

Our chat came to a curt end. Fortunately prior to speaking to Sir Bernard, Guido had a longer conversation with Dame Eleanor Laing, the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. She conceded that she held a “business meeting” on that evening, where “I was so strict with my 2 metre ruler and told everyone we will adhere to those rules and be very careful.” Guido laughed when Dame Eleanor claimed she had her 2 metre ruler in front of her right there and then.

The Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons dictated the following statement to Guido

At the beginning of the pandemic I took advice on how many could be present in a room, I had the room measured and I kept a 2 metre ruler so that I could always verify that nobody who was working here was put at risk.

Guido asked her again:

Guido: Were any drinks served?

Eleanor: I don’t know. I will have to check.

No need Eleanor, Guido already has checked. Eleanor hosted a drinks party to celebrate her friend Anne Jenkin’s 65th birthday on that day. There was a cake for Baroness Jenkin and people were invited by WhatsApp for “drinks”. There was a spread of food, other MPs attended including some of the 2019 intake and others. It was not an impromptu affair – the nibbles had been bought in.

One source says that Dame Eleanor did mention the need for social distancing – to some amusement – and windows and doors were open, although initial attempts to social distance “went out the window”. The crowd included those typically involved with Anne Jenkin and the Women2Win campaign, such as Maria Miller. A co-conspirator says there was “loads of drink” and that they specifically remember Bernard Jenkin with drink in hand at a jolly affair.

On that day December 8th 2020, London was in Tier 2 lockdown. Gatherings of more than 6 indoors either in a public or private building were against the regulations. No Christmas exception applied and breaches of the regulations were offences which could be prosecuted or dealt with by fixed penalty notices with penalties ranging up to £10,000. The guidance was clear:

Although there are exemptions for work purposes, you must not have a work Christmas lunch or party, where that is a primarily social activity and is not otherwise permitted by the rules in your tier.

This was a birthday party, in breach of the legal regulations, and to top it off there was even birthday cake.

UPDATE: Boris Calls on Bernard Jenkin to Resign Over His Own Drinks Party

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I think that Guido idiot bloke does not understand what the privileges committee was examining regards Johnson. The fact that Johnson attended drinks parties during lockdown was fully established long ago and fines were issued accordingly. That bit is history.
The privileges committee was determining if Johnson had lied to parliament. Not whether he or anyone else had a party during lockdown. So this false and very damp squib by Johnson and by Guido is going to have zero impact on anything. As you would know if understood what was going on

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Oh I do love the way that somebody who has left the country, tries to tell people who still live here what’s going on in our country. How’s the Eurozone recession going by the way?

Yes I do know what the committee are investigating. And if you’d seen the way that Bernard Jenkins was questioning Boris you’d see the hypocrisy in it. But I’ve noticed you’re blind to hypocrisy.

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Hi

The Conservatives are supposed to be governing the Country at a time when it has many issuses which need resolving.

Instead they are concentrating on playing politics amongst themselves and.

It is not surprising that we are an International Joke.

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This a typical distraction tactic from Boris Johnson that doesn’t change the fact he broke the law and lied about it.

Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader

Quite … Trump Tactic #11

BJ, of course, is a notorious and well-documented partygoer and liar who gained a police record while in office - the forthcoming report will, no doubt, contain further evidence of BJ’s hospitality, both at No 10 and Chequers, which the public were unaware of.

BJ forgets his place - he is no longer PM, he is no longer an MP and, shortly, he will lose his parliamentary pass - BJ becomes OJ - Ordinary Joe … :laughing:

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Don’t you read any of Strathmore’s posts. The investigation is about whether he lied to parliament. And how anybody can prove that somebody has lied is beyond me unless they’re mind readers.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t know he was breaking any rules, because when he was at the press conference he didn’t know the rules then, it was always the others who were saying what they were and they were even putting him right when he said the wrong thing.

I remember him saying that people should use their common sense and I agreed with that and that’s what I did all along.

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You’re wrong - The committee, chaired by Labour’s Harriet Harman but with a Conservative majority, is investigating whether Mr Johnson was in contempt of parliament when he said there had been no COVID rule breaches in Number 10.

Contempt of parliament is defined as an obstruction or interference of the workings of the Commons and can include misleading the House - something the prime minister has denied doing.

It may be beyond you but it’s not beyond the wit of man.

Well, that’s damning evidence of an incompetent leader - the one who made the rules … :rofl:

I remember BJ saying a awful lot of BS … and it’s all been documented.

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Omah says you’re wrong.

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Don’t lie … :018:

I quoted YOU … :expressionless:

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Strathmore said it first and he knows better than anybody, if you want to know anything about the UK just ask him.

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I’ll try to avoid getting personal about any forum members because that’s not nice but I can’t help feeling a personal animosity towards Boris.

I must admit that when a previous poster mentioned a “Trump Tactic” , it resonated with me - the way Boris is acting is reminding me more and more of Trump - or is it Trump who is copying Johnson’s tactics?

It is almost prophetic that Johnson wrote the playbook for both him and Trump’s political strategy back in 1988, as a student at Oxford.
It was then that Boris Johnson penned an essay for a book (The Oxford Myth) edited by his sister Rachel.

In it he advised aspiring politicians to assemble “a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges” to help achieve success.
He wrote that
“The tragedy of the stooge is that … he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth…
The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.”

I can’t help thinking of those words when Johnson’s stooges and Trump’s stooges defend those two conmen to the hilt, even when their actions go beyond the defensible!

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And I think anybody who thinks that all MPs don’t try to mislead the electorate are delusional either that or they themselves are trying to mislead other people.

I’ve got no idea about Trump as don’t follow him, but I do know he’s been accused of lying, but as I say if anybody thinks that Biden doesn’t lie then either they’re delusional or lying themselves.

As for Boris, yes he misleads, but so do all the others and they are just hypocrites, who say look at that naughty man, but I’m such an angel, sorry to burst your bubble Boot, but they’re not, so as I’ve said, I’m not sure if you’re delusional or tying to mislead.

Do you remember Corbyn lying in parliament saying he didn’t call Mrs May a stupid woman.

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:rofl:

No need to feel sorry - you are not “bursting my bubble” :rofl:

You are giving your opinion - I am giving mine.

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etc, etc.

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… and:

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Political lying began with Boris Johnson. Or at least that’s what British political Twitter has led us to believe. When Johnson was still UK prime minister, we would hear near-daily outbursts from the great and the good about Johnson’s endless ‘lies’. Here was a man who ‘knows a hundred different ways to lie’. A man who ‘lies and lies and lies’. According to one book-length account of Johnson’s fibs, ‘Standards of truth-telling… collapsed at the precise moment Boris Johnson and his associates entered 10 Downing Street in the early afternoon of 24 July 2019’. Apparently, his occasionally misleading statements, his spinning of statistics, amounted to a fully fledged ‘assault on truth’ itself.

Given all this pearl-clutching over the dishonesty of Johnson, often in relation to the sorts of fibs and spin politicians have always indulged in, it is striking just how muted the reaction has been to the even more flagrant deceptions of Sir Keir Starmer. Unlike Johnson, the Labour leader hasn’t simply made a series of bombastic, exaggerated statements – he has shredded just about every principle he once claimed to hold dear.

This week, Starmer admitted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he will abandon his pledge to scrap university tuition fees – a promise he made to the Labour membership in 2020. Other pledges he has jettisoned from his Labour leadership campaign include nationalising the utilities firms, increasing income tax on high earners, keeping freedom of movement with the EU and banning outsourcing in the NHS.

Even before Starmer became Labour leader, his flip-flopping over Brexit was shameless in the extreme. After the Leave vote and before the 2017 election, Starmer said that Brexit needed to happen as a ‘matter of principle’. It wasn’t long before that principle was betrayed and he became a leading cheerleader for a second referendum. Now that he is Labour leader he has pledged to ‘make Brexit work’ – a promise so empty that neither Leavers nor Rejoiners can really trust it.

Of course, Starmer claims that he has not abandoned these pledges at all. According to him, he has merely ‘adapted’ these positions to suit today’s straightened economic climate. This is nonsense, of course. Not least because many of Starmer’s about-turns have been over culture-war issues, which have precious little to do with taxing and spending.

Take his flip-flopping on transgenderism. At times, he’s been a strident supporter of the trans movement. In 2020, he committed Labour to introducing gender self-identification. In 2021, he admonished gender-critical feminists who say that ‘only women have a cervix’. But then, last month, in an apparent concession to biological reality, he said that ‘99.9 per cent of women haven’t got a penis’. He also promised that there would be no ‘rolling back’ of women’s sex-based rights under a Labour government. Although Starmer has left open the bizarre possibility of one in 1,000 women having penises, this is still 1,000 miles away from his earlier trans-rights pledges.

Starmer has been just as inconsistent on the big protest movements of our time. He took the knee for Black Lives Matter in early June 2020, only to dismiss its signature demand to ‘defund the police’ a few weeks later. As for Extinction Rebellion and other road-blocking green activists, he was singing their praises back in 2019. ‘Climate change is the issue of our time, and as the Extinction Rebellion protest showed us this week, the next generation is not going to forgive us if we don’t take action’, he said. Since becoming Labour leader, he’s been calling for more eco-activists to be arrested and to face longer jail time.

The about-turns are dizzying. They are not just everyday untruths. Imagine if Boris had campaigned to Get Brexit Done, and instead took us into the Euro. That is the level of political deception Keir has stooped to. So where is all the anger from the chattering classes?

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Now we are really getting into the Trump Playbook - answer criticism by pointing the finger at other people - classic diversionary tactics! :rofl:

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Boot you might find it funny, but I don’t. So you think it’s alright for politicians to mislead the electorate, I don’t.

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Dear Harriet,

You will no doubt have seen the reports in today’s media concerning Sir Bernard Jenkin. It has been reported that he attended a rule-breaking birthday party event when London was in Tier 2 restrictions. The reports suggest alcohol was served at the event and that it broke the rules on numbers. To my knowledge, as of this point, he has made no attempt to deny the allegations.

And yet at no time has he seen fit to tell you, or the House of Commons about this alleged gathering. He has repeatedly insisted that any such breaches are a matter of the utmost gravity for any public servant.

If indeed it is the case that he broke the rules himself – and knowingly broke them – Sir Bernard is guilty of flagrant and monstrous hypocrisy.

But I am afraid it is far worse than that.

He has just voted to expel me from the House of Commons because he says – falsely – that I concealed from the House my knowledge of illicit events.

If indeed he did attend a blatantly rule breaking event he would be guilty of doing exactly what he claims that I did. Although this report is not yet confirmed by an investigation, I believe he should have informed the Committee of his conflict and he should have informed the House.

He should have recused himself.

I really find it incredible – and nauseating – that this matter is emerging at this stage of your process.

Are you please able to confirm that you have asked every member of the committee whether they attended any such events, and that these checks were made before your inquiry began?

I would be grateful for your urgent response and to know how the committee intends to proceed, since it seems to me that Sir Bernard can no longer be held to have been a valid judge or investigator in these proceedings.

Yours

Boris Johnson

After two hours, we have no comment from Bernard Jenkin. So far as Guido knows he is not taking calls from the press. So here’s a reminder of some of his most hypocritical statements at the Privileges Committee:

  • “The rules were clear, they were there for everyone, and no one is above the law…”
  • “The lockdown was a time of sacrifice and hardship for many.‘it’s only right that those in power should lead by example”
  • “The public trust in our institution is paramount. Any breach, however minor, is a serious matter”
  • “We must hold ourselves to the highest standards. If we do not, how can we expect the public to do so?”
  • “It is not just about following the letter of the law, but also the spirit of the law. We, as public servants, should be the first to adhere to this”
  • “We cannot expect the public to follow rules that we ourselves do not follow. It is a matter of integrity and honesty”
  • “Transparency is key in these matters. Any attempt to hide or downplay breaches only serves to undermine public trust”
  • “We must remember that our actions have consequences. Breaching lockdown rules can lead to serious health risks for others”

Bernard really needs to hold himself to the same standard he demanded of Boris.