Johnson is all apologies before parliament after ‘Partygate’ fine

Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced Parliament on Tuesday as an awkward pioneer in British politics: a confirmed lawbreaker who misled fellow lawmakers but remains ensconced in the nation’s highest elected office.

>>Mark Landler and Stephen CastleThe New York Times
Published : 20 April 2022, 10:17 AM
Updated : 20 April 2022, 10:18 AM

Apologising profusely for his recent police fine for breaching coronavirus restrictions, Johnson tried to move on from a scandal over illicit Downing Street parties that has threatened his hold on power. The war in Ukraine and a lack of obvious successors to him have conspired to keep him in his job, at least for now.

But Johnson’s political resilience did not mask the weighty legal and constitutional issues at stake. Opposition lawmakers hammered the prime minister for flouting the rules he imposed on others and accused him of misleading Parliament when he claimed that none of the social gatherings held in his office had been improper.

“He knows he’s dishonest and incapable of changing, so he drags everybody else down with him,” said Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party. He urged backbench members of Johnson’s Conservative Party not to follow “in the slipstream of an out-of-touch, out-of-control prime minister.”

A single Conservative lawmaker, Mark Harper, called on Johnson to resign. Several echoed the arguments of his Cabinet ministers that the scandal was a distraction at a time when Europe is facing its gravest security crisis since World War II. Forcing out their leader now, they said, would be a mistake.

Still, the angry, emotional tenor of the debate revealed how deeply the scandal has blackened Johnson’s reputation. No prime minister in living memory has been formally designated as a lawbreaker, and he faces the prospect of additional fines for attending other illicit parties. Tory lawmakers began drifting out of the chamber as the debate wore on, suggesting limits to the party’s backing for him.

Johnson stuck to his penitent tone, apologising more than a dozen times, although he never explicitly admitted to breaking the law when asked directly. He was especially contrite about his previous statements to Parliament, which pose a particular danger to him since they have been exposed as misleading, either intentionally or unwittingly.

“It did not occur to me, then or subsequently, that a gathering in the Cabinet room just before a vital meeting on COVID strategy could amount to a breach of the rules,” Johnson said. “That was my mistake, and I apologise for it unreservedly.”

Ministers caught lying to Parliament are expected to resign under rules written in what is known as the ministerial code. As recently as 2018, a Conservative lawmaker, Amber Rudd, quit as home secretary after admitting that she had “inadvertently misled” lawmakers over government targets for removing immigrants in the country illegally.

“The ministerial code is quite clear: Deliberately misleading Parliament is a resigning offence since it prevents Parliament doing its job of scrutiny,” said Vernon Bogdanor, an expert on constitutional issues and professor of government at King’s College London. “The trouble is that there is no means of enforcing this principle against a prime minister if his party continues to support him.”

Indeed, the ultimate arbiter of the ministerial code is the prime minister himself. Johnson has disregarded this system of checks and balances before, in 2020, when it involved a member of his government.

That was when Johnson’s independent ethics adviser, Alex Allan, concluded that the home secretary, Priti Patel, had breached the ministerial code in her treatment of members of her staff, even if she was not aware she was bullying them. Despite that finding, Johnson decided that Patel had not breached the code and should not resign, and it was ultimately Allan who quit.

Now Johnson is in the odd position of being a prime minister who is accused of breaking the code, making him effectively the judge and jury in his own case. He has made it clear that he has no intention of stepping down, declaring that the best way to come back from this scandal is to deliver on behalf of the British people.

“It’s something the people who drew up the ministerial code didn’t really anticipate happening,” said Hannah White, deputy director of the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank. Under what she called the “good chap” theory of government, the prime minister would typically have resigned before getting to this point.

The lack of any mechanism to punish a prime minister who is found to have misled Parliament, White said, exposed a flaw in Britain’s unwritten constitution and political arrangements.

“If it’s OK for the prime minister to say whatever they want when questioned by the House of Commons and then just say ‘Oh well, I genuinely thought that was true and now I realise that it’s not,’ then there is no actual mechanism for the House of Commons to hold the government to account,” she said.

Johnson will face a vote Thursday on whether his conduct should be referred to a formal parliamentary investigation. With a roughly 80-seat Conservative majority, that is highly unlikely to happen. But it will have the effect of putting Conservative lawmakers on the record in their support of Johnson — something that opponents could use against them in future elections.

On Tuesday, opposition leaders offered a tangy foretaste of those attacks.

“A lawbreaking prime minister — just dwell on this,” said Ian Blackford, the leader of Scottish National Party in the British Parliament. “A prime minister who has broken the law and remains under investigation over additional lawbreaking. Not just a lawbreaker, a serial offender. If he has any decency, any dignity, he would not just apologise; he would resign.”

Nor are critics impressed with the way that Johnson’s allies have compared the fine he was given for breaking lockdown laws with a speeding ticket. The prime minister steered clear of that comparison Tuesday.

For critics, the biggest cost of the scandal may be diminished public trust in government. COVID-19 restrictions were particularly hard on families with relatives who ended up in the hospital, where they sometimes died alone, barred from seeing their loved ones. Many of those people have expressed outrage that Johnson and his colleagues, who imposed those rules, did not abide by them.

“In our strange constitution, all depends on public feeling,” Bogdanor said. “If the public feels strongly enough, they could compel a prime ministerial resignation by writing to their MPs, by Conservative voluntary workers refusing to do voluntary work, and by votes in the local elections.”

As it happens, Britain will hold local elections May 5. They loom as perhaps the ultimate test of whether Johnson will survive this scandal.

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