Parliament is intended to protect against an over-mighty government. It was almost as if they were relieved to ditch the responsibility. No one can fault the MPs for the rigour or energy with which they investigate and attack each other – but where was this energy when the lockdown rules were being designed? Where was our forensic democratic apparatus when it was needed the most? Our MPs abandoned their posts, signing emergency Covid powers long after the emergency ended. Parliament is not much better, as the Privileges Committee’s report proves. It’s a sign of a deeply dysfunctional system. So ministers can preside over policy calamities and keep getting promoted – but send a message from the wrong email account, violating Section 2.14 of the code, and you’re out on your ear. The ministerial code, which is now held up as the golden rule book, prohibits (for example) government announcements being made outside Parliament or telling anyone what is said in Cabinet. The use of legal technicalities to destroy political opponents is, overall, a deplorable trend. So making him the first prime minister in history to be denied a pass to enter Parliament will look to many like a deranged overreaction. But there is not a shred of evidence proving that he knowingly misled MPs. Those of us who spoke brightly about his potential as prime minister have had to feast on humble pie. His lack of grip meant his government descended into a disgraceful shambles that squandered his historic election victory. His aloofness doesn’t diminish his culpability in many ways, it makes things worse. His hands-off style worked when he did my job editing The Spectator and when he was London mayor. The culture under Dominic Cummings, then his chief adviser, was one of seeing him as a “wonky shopping trolley” that was supposed to go in whatever direction they pushed it but sometimes didn’t. He knows not to ask and those around him know not to tell. He can sense when things are going on that he’d best not know about. He lives in a world of plausible deniability, using a combination of his intelligence and his clownishness to play dumb when it suits him. But did Johnson himself know about those “wine-time Fridays”? He says not, and I’m afraid to say I believe him – knowing, as I do, a bit about how he operates. We do see an appalling culture in which No 10 was (in the words of one staffer) an “oasis” in the lockdown regime imposed on the rest of us. The Privileges Committee report she presided over finds him guilty of “deliberately” misleading Parliament in his false denials – but nowhere in that 108-page document is there any hard evidence of this. Harriet Harman’s absurd overreaction to his partygate excuses has now given him what he doesn’t really deserve: the ability to say he was framed. It’s easy to forget that he was forced out of No10 not by a technicality or witch hunt, but because he ran a court of chaos under which his own MPs were ultimately unwilling to serve. Of all the sins for which Boris Johnson deserved to lose his job as prime minister, his public mutterings about office parties would not even make the top 20.
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