Boris Johnson a ‘coward’ for quitting to avoid byelection, says Angela Rayner

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Boris Johnson is a “coward” who has “no respect” for the 2019 Conservative voters who put their faith in him, Labour’s deputy leader has said, after he dramatically quit parliament before the findings of a cross-party investigation into whether he lied to the Commons had been published.,

The former prime minister resigned on Friday night after learning that an investigation into the Partygate scandal found he misled parliament, and he was likely to face a lengthy suspension from the Commons.

In a resentful statement Johnson said there was a “witch-hunt under way, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result”, while accusing the investigation of acting as a “kangaroo court”.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said he had jumped to avoid a potential byelection in his west London constituency.

“To me, he is a coward,” she said. “He knows that the privileges committee has seen through this fiasco and he has jumped. He could have defended himself, he could have gone to his constituents and fought the suspension, and he has decided he is not going to do that because he knows he is in the wrong.”

Johnson won an 80-seat political majority in 2019, overturning decades of political tradition by winning votes in solid “red wall” seats across Labour’s former industrial heartlands.

He launched a blistering attack on Rishi Sunak’s government, accusing him of “passively abandoning” the pledges on which he won the 2019 election.

Rayner said Johnson’s bitter 1,000-word statement showed “it was all about Boris and it has always been all about Boris to him, and people will be left disappointed by his legacy”.

Rayner told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think the people put their trust in him because they thought he was about change and he was about putting them at the heart of decision-making, and he has let them down truly in the most devastating way at the time when they needed him most.

“No one could have predicted what happened to this country during the pandemic, but at the time when the public needed him the most, he basically was partying and lying to them at a time when they couldn’t see their loved ones. And that is unforgivable.”

Chris Bryant, the Labour chair of the privileges committee who recused himself from the Johnson investigation, said the former prime minister could be levelled with a new contempt of parliament charge after his “narcissistic rant”.

Bryant disputed Johnson’s suggestions that the inquiry was trying to “undermine Brexit” as Sir Bernard Jenkin, an arch Brexiter, sits on the committee that led the investigation.

“[The privileges committee] may want to conclude that there has been an additional contempt of parliament by the way that Boris Johnson has behaved in the last 24 hours and in the attacks on the committee, which are in effect an attack on the whole house,” Bryant said.

“I don’t think anybody can now be in any doubt that Boris Johnson holds parliament in contempt. I thought that was evident through the illegal prorogation of parliament, but it’s certainly true now.”

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Johnson hinted he hoped to make some sort of political comeback in his statement, as he said: “It is very sad to be leaving parliament – at least for now – but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by [the Labour MP] Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias.”

His former spokesperson Will Walden said Johnson had “seen the writing on the wall” and the “only one thing driving Boris is that he likes to win, or at least not to lose”.

He said: “It feels to me he is angry and he is convinced by his own truth and his own righteousness. There’s no apology, no taking responsibility. It all feels very Trumpian.”

He added: “He hasn’t lost an election for 26 years, when the voters of Clwyd South decided he wasn’t their man in 1997. I think the first thing to understand is this report clearly threatened to change all that.

“So by going, as he has, all guns blazing, he is able to avoid defeat, he is able to blame pretty much everyone else, including it seems anyone that voted remain in 2016.

“There is no plan but he is preparing himself for what might be next without the humiliation of being kicked out.”

Matt Fowler and Jo Goodman, the co-founders of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said: “Boris Johnson’s legacy will be one of lies, self-interest, and most importantly the catastrophic mishandling of a pandemic leading to the death of 250,000 people, and the sixth worst Covid-19 death toll in the world.

“He may have resigned, but the devastating impact of his premiership and the pain caused by his deceit will live with each of us who have lost a loved one to Covid-19 for the rest of our lives.”