Boris Johnson has just been completely torn apart in the parliamentary privileges committee’s report into partygate – and Twitter can’t get enough.
The long-awaited report dived into whether Johnson deliberately misled the house of Commons by standing at the despatch box as prime minister and saying no Covid lockdown rules had been broken in Downing Street.
He was later fined for breaching his own lockdown measures behind the doors of No.10.
On Thursday, following an in-depth investigation, the committee declared the former prime minister and ex-MP deliberately misled the Commons, impugned the committee and was then “complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation” of its members.
It recommended that Johnson should not receive a former member’s parliamentary pass, which all ex-MPs are entitled to. It also claimed that if he were still a sitting MP then they would have advised a 90-day suspension for him – that’s about as severe a punishment as the Commons can deliver.
While the sanctions in the report have to be voted on by MPs, the report was about as brutal as it could have been, adding that there is “no precedent” for a prime minister to have deliberately misled the Commons like this.
“He misled the House on an issue of the greatest importance to the House and to the public, and did so repeatedly,” the report explained.
Johnson himself has dismissed its findings as a “charade”, calling the committee a “kangaroo court” whose purpose “has been to find me guilty regardless of the facts”.
It’s worth remembering that the privileges committee is a cross-party group of MPs with a Tory majority.
Johnson furiously stepped down as a Tory MP last week after seeing the report in advance. He has admitted that his statements to the House did misled parliament about partygate, but claims he did not do so intentionally or recklessly.
But Twitter has no remorse for Johnson today, and instead celebrated his “comeuppance”: