By deliberately misleading MPs, as the Commons privileges committee reported last week, Boris Johnson committed a serious contempt of parliament. Last night, MPs approved the committee’s report by a majority of 354 to seven.
With such an overwhelming vote, it seems strange that all the Commons can now do is to prevent Johnson from wandering round parliament unaccompanied by a pass-holder. Quite separately, the privileges committee called last year for powers that would have allowed recalcitrant witnesses to be imprisoned for contempt. I had argued against this in oral evidence to the committee and was pleased to see that the government subsequently rejected the creation of a new criminal offence.
A handful of Conservatives supported their former leader. Lia Nici said she couldn’t see any evidence that Johnson “misled parliament knowingly, intentionally or recklessly”. But the only one who went so far as to say he had been “forced out of parliament by a tiny handful of people, with no evidence to back up their assertions, and without the approval even of Conservative party members, let alone the wider electorate” was Johnson himself, in his resignation statement just over a week ago.
In a welcome return to the blogosphere, Professor Mark Elliott firmly demolishes that assertion. It is both “deeply flawed and highly corrosive”, he writes. “Indeed, its post-truth character means that it can be described as Trumpian without any risk of hyperbole.”
And that takes us neatly to a new blog by Bill Barr, who served as US attorney general under Donald Trump from February 2019 to December 2020.
“Trump’s indictment is not the result of unfair government persecution,” writes Barr. “This is a situation entirely of his own making. The effort to present Trump as a victim in the Mar-a-Lago document affair is cynical political propaganda.”
The former attorney general deals persuasively with arguments I have heard from Trump’s supporters, including the illogical “what about Hillary?” question.
Both pieces are well worth reading in full. There’ll be another one of mine along tomorrow.
Update 0900: here’s a very good piece on Johnson’s true legacy by Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government.