Boris Johnson: MPs debate report that found former prime minister misled parliament – UK politics live

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Labour’s Karl Turner commends the privileges committee for the job done compiling the report.

He says that anybody who reads the report “would have to conclude the reality that Boris Johnson was a liar”.

Turner says:

Very often you would be surprised that he could get away with the things he was saying but it’s proven now that he was dishonest.

He goes on to question why Johnson received taxpayers’ money to fund his legal aid. The former prime minister should “pay up himself”, he says.

Turner also raises the issue of honours being handed to “people who were boozing it up in central Tory office”. He adds that Rishi Sunak should be “ashamed of himself” for not attending the debate.

Here comes Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con), who was recently knighted in Boris Johnson’s controversial resignation honours list.

He says the fixed-penalty notice Boris Johnson received for attending the birthday gathering was not a “conviction” or “admission of guilt”.

The report “decides to impute a stain on his character”, Rees-Mogg continues. He adds that the report “decides as if it were an Elon Musk particle to insert itself in the brain of Mr Johnson to work out what he must have thought in a particular moment”.

He infers that the committee “wanted to come to a particular conclusion” about the former prime minister.

He says:

They go from the vindictive to the ridiculous in not allowing him a parliamentary pass.

Rees-Mogg goes on to question the 90-day sanction that Johnson would have received had he not resigned his seat last week. He compares the privileges committee to “communist China”…

Dame Margaret Hodge (Lab) is now speaking. She says trust in Westminster “can only exist if we tell the truth”.

She goes on to say that the committee’s conclusions are based entirely on incontrovertible evidence and says it is “shameful” to try to de-legitimatise the report’s findings.

Hodge says that reported attempts to “bully or blackmail” are shocking and that the integrity of parliament must come before all else.

She says:

Boris Johnson allowed this creeping culture of corruption and unchecked executive power to infect our democracy.

John Baron (Con) says he will vote to approve the privileges committee’s report if there is a vote. But he hopes there won’t be one, he says.

He says the Commons normally approves these reports without a vote.

Ministers can only be held to account if they tell the truth at the dispatch box, he says.

He says if MPs are saying the Commons cannot regulate itself, they are in effect calling for an outsider to do that job. That should be worrying, he says.

Today parliament is putting right a wrong, he says. That is why this is a good day for parliament.

That is all from me for today. My colleague Tom Ambrose is taking over now.

Bryant is now defending the privileges committee.

He says the standards committee (whose MP members are mostly the same as the privileges committee’s) concluded Boris Johnson had not broken rules about the registration of a holiday, even though the parliamentary commissioner for standards claimed he had.

And he says Sir Ernest Ryder, the legal adviser to the privileges committee, would not have allowed it to operate an unfair system. Ryder used to run the tribunals service, he says.

Chris Bryant, the Labour chair of the Commons standards committee (and chair of the privileges committee until he stood aside for this inquiry, because of his previous comments about Boris Johnson), says people made sacrifices during the pandemic because they felt we were all in this together. That is why they feel so strongly about this, he says.

He defends the committee’s conclusion that Johnson would have deserved a 90-day suspension if he were still an MP.

He says the closest precedent he could find was Sir Michael Grylls, a Tory involved in the cash for questions scandal in the 1990s. He says Grylls had stood down by the time the parliamentary inquiry into him was over. But the committee said that, if he were still an MP, he should be suspended for a substantial period, “augmented to take account of his deceit”.

Sir Jake Berry, a former Tory chair and another supporter, intervenes on Lia Nici. He says Boris Johnson is being criticised for how people interpreted the assurances he gave to MPs, not for what he actually said.

Nici agrees.

She says the report was not written in an impartial way.

She says there is no evidence in the report saying people told Johnson about parties taking place in the building.

Johnson is not the caretaker of the building, she says. It was not his job to go around the building seeing what people were doing.

She says No 10 is full of police officers. If rules were being broken, that would have been reported to him, she says.

Jess Phillips (Lab) asks Nici if she has considered that Johnson might have lied to her.

MPs laugh at that.

Nici says she does not think that is the case. She is a good judge of character, she claims.

She says the opposition to Johnson is being led by people who want “a formidable opponent out of their way”.

In the Commons Lia Nici (Con) is speaking now. She is the first MP to defend Boris Johnson.

She says she has read the whole report, and cannot see any evidence that Johnson misled MPs, recklessly or deliberately.

She also says she used to be Johnson’s parliamentary private secretary.

An SNP MP intervenes to gell Nici “there is none so blind as those who will not see”.

Nici says, when Johnson told MPs the rules were followed, he was repeating the advice he had been given.

She says many of the people who gave that advice are still working in Westminster, but that we do not know how those people are because they are not well known.

Dame Angela Eagle (Lab) is speaking now. She says the privileges committee discharged its duties with honour. MPs should support them. But “the Boris Johnson-worshipping print and TV media” has traduced them, egged on by Johnson himself, she says.

She says MPs who have condemned the committee as a “kangaroo court” have committed a contempt of parliament.

A reader asks:

Can you give us an estimate of how full the chamber is?

A colleague who has been watching from the press gallery (I’m watching on TV) says the Labour benches are fairly full. There are fewer Tory MPs in the chamber (several dozen?), but still more than you might expect for business on a one-line whip.

Dame Andrea Leadsom, the Tory former leader of the Commons, says she will be supporting the motion tonight.

She urges all MPs to approve the motion without a division.

Harman ended her speech by playing to tribute to the role of the media in this affair, and particulary to the work done by Pippa Crerar, the former Daily Mirror political editor who is now political editor at the Guardian, and ITV’s Paul Brand. They were responsible for the most important Partygate revelations.