LONDON – Mr Boris Johnson should be excluded from Parliament for wilfully misleading lawmakers over rule-breaking Covid-19 lockdown parties at his office, a committee said on Thursday in a damning report the former British prime minister described as “rubbish”.

The report from the privileges committee – the main disciplinary body for lawmakers – said Mr Johnson had wilfully misled Parliament several times when he was asked about Downing Street gatherings during Covid-19 lockdowns.

The committee accused Mr Johnson of being “complicit in a campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation”. Its conclusions were a new low for one of Britain’s best-known and divisive politicians. Just four years ago, he led the governing Conservatives to a landslide election victory; his tenure was cut short by scandal.

Mr Johnson shot back, repeating his claims of innocence and condemning the report as “rubbish”, “a lie” and “a charade”, and accused committee members of waging a vendetta against him.

The stand-off will do little to heal the deep divisions in the governing Conservative Party and can only pile pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who had pledged to restore “integrity, professionalism and accountability” to government.

The committee’s members – from the Conservative and opposition Labour parties – said: “We conclude that in deliberately misleading the House, Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt.”

“The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the prime minister, the most senior member of the government. There is no precedent for a prime minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House (of Commons, the lower house of Parliament).” 

“We recommend that he should not be entitled to a former Member’s pass,” it added, referring to a pass which enables former prime ministers to gain access to Parliament.

It rejected Mr Johnson’s defence that gatherings were within the rules and that his advisers had supported his belief that that was the case. Instead, it said, Mr Johnson was “deliberately disingenuous when he tried to reinterpret his statements to the House to avoid their plain meaning and reframe the clear impression that he intended to give”.

It said that if Mr Johnson were still an MP, it would have recommended a suspension from the House for 90 days.

Mr Johnson resigned from Parliament last week after seeing an advance copy of the report, calling the inquiry a “witch hunt”, a criticism he double-downed on after its publication.

“I believed, correctly, that these events were reasonably necessary for work purposes. We were managing a pandemic,” he said in a statement, adding that the report marked 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,” he claimed.

He accused the committee of using mystical powers to see things that he had not seen at Downing Street, when, he said, he was duty bound to thank staff who were departing or for their work on Covid-19.

The Labour Party said the report was “damning”. 

“While Rishi Sunak is distracted with the ongoing Tory soap opera people are crying out for leadership on the issues that matter to them,” said Ms Thangam Debbonaire, a member of Labour’s top team. 

But even those Conservative lawmakers who are not particularly loyal to Mr Johnson questioned the severity of the committee’s findings. 

“I’m not his biggest fan but it seems to me it’s excessive,” said one on condition of anonymity.

Mr Johnson has apologised for his conduct but repeatedly denied deliberately misleading Parliament, saying he took advice from his aides that his office were following the rules. 

But so-called partygate ultimately spelt the end for a prime minister, who was mired in scandal.

A rebellion in his governing Conservative Party in 2022 forced him in July that year to say he would step down. He left office in September. 

He resigned from Parliament last week after a spell as a regular member of the House of Commons, during which he continued to wield significant influence within the Conservatives that at times undermined Mr Sunak’s authority. 

While Mr Sunak was once a protege of Mr Johnson, the two have become rivals after Mr Sunak resigned from Mr Johnson’s government shortly before it fell.

They also rowed this week over the former prime minister’s resignation honours list. REUTERS