Kay Burley pulled business minister Paul Scully apart over his attempts to defend Boris Johnson over partygate on Wednesday.
The Sky News presenter was picking up on the latest controversy around the prime minister’s decision not to step down, despite being fined for breaching his own Covid rules during lockdown.
Johnson has also maintained that he did not knowingly mislead the Commons when he previously claimed he had not broken any Covid rules.
As Burley pointed out, knowingly misleading the house is a breach of the ministerial code.
So she asked Scully: “What should happen if a minister breaks the code? Should they resign?”
He said yes – “that’s the expected thing to do”, but that the prime minister did not “knowingly” mislead parliament.
″I’ve just explained that in my opinion, for all the reasons I’ve said, I don’t believe he did knowingly mislead parliament,” Scully added.
Burley hit back: ″I want to put this in my back pocket for when you come back in a month’s time and he’s got more convictions and then we remind ourselves again about what he said.”
Johnson has already been fined for attending a party in Downing Street in June 2020, but he could face further fixed penalty notices for three other events currently under investigation by the police.
Scully confidently replied: ″Put it in your back pocket! This is why it’s difficult to speculate. What we are after, what I’m after, what every MP is after, is the whole information.
“We come on [here] day in day out to speak to you, to speak your colleagues – really happy to do so – with not all the information. That’s part of the media cycle, that’s how it works.”
The Sky News presenter asked: ″That’s interesting – so you’re as frustrated as everyone else in the country to try and get to the bottom of what happened in Downing Street?”
The minister said he wanted to see the Sue Gray report, and wait for the Met probe to conclude, before the country can move on.
Burley then brought up Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis’s controversial comparison between parking tickets and Covid fines from Tuesday.
She asked if Scully thought this was a “nonsense” claim, as much more was at risk from people breaching Covid rules than parking.
He replied: “I think what Brandon Lewis was saying yesterday is that the process is actually very similar.
“You’re not technically found guilty, you’re not technically convicted because that is done in a court, not by the police. The police enforce the law.
″That’s the point Brandon was making rather than the juxtaposition of parking and a Covid transgression.”