Boris Johnson set to submit Partygate dossier, saying he didn’t deliberately mislead MPs – UK politics live

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DUP MPs are meeting today, reportedly to discuss how they will vote when the Commons debates Rishi Sunak’s Northern Ireland protocol deal on Wednesday.

But Ian Paisley has already said that he will definitely be voting against, and that he expects the other seven DUP MPs to do so too. In an interview with the News Letter in Belfast, he said:

I am categorically voting against, and I would be surprised if my colleagues do not join me.

My initial reaction to the Windsor Framework was that I didn’t think it cut the mustard in terms of addressing our seven key tests (on restoring NI’s place within the UK internal market).

After taking time to study it and a least one legal opinion on it, and going through the details, and also having conversations and messages back and forward to the secretary of state, I am still of that opinion – that it doesn’t address any of our seven tests.

It is the old substance dressed up in a new package with a ribbon around it, but it hasn’t actually changed, or addressed the fundamental issue of Northern Ireland trade being disrupted in our internal UK market.

Paisley set out his opposition to the protocol deal last month, in the foreword to a report on it by the Centre for the Union, a unionist thinktank. That report, which included an opinion from John Larkin KC, a former attorney general for Northern Ireland, said the new deal fails the first of the DUP’s seven tests, which is that any deal must uphold the provisions on the Acts of Union 1800, which said all parts of the UK should be covered by the same rules on trade.

Paisley and his fellow DUP MP Sammy Wilson have always been particularly hostile to the protocol. Other DUP MPs are thought to be more inclined to support it, or at least to abstain.

Kate Forbes, the Scottish government’s finance secretary and SNP leadership candidate, has said the turmoil in the party exposed at the end of last week confirmed her view that it needed to change. On Saturday Peter Murrell, chief executive of the party and Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, resigned after it emerged that the party had misled journalists to cover up a 30,000 fall in membership figures.

In an interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland, Forbes said:

I obviously strongly believe that the events over the last few days – which have of course hurt, and I think bemused, a lot of SNP members not least myself – have confirmed my calls from the very beginning of the contest, which is that we need change in the SNP, we need change in government and that change needs to be based on some very fundamental principles of honesty, competence, transparency.

I’ve said from the very outset that continuity won’t cut it, that the status quo wasn’t good enough and that we couldn’t just continue to go on as we were going on if we wanted different results.

And that’s not just about policy, it’s also about the delivery of those policies and the culture that accompanies it.

But Forbes also said she was not in favour of the contest being re-run. She said she had confidence in the process and wanted it to reach its conclusion, which is due with the announcement of the new leader on Monday 27 March, a week today.

My colleague Libby Brooks has a good article here on how people in Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, where Forbes is the MSP, view her candidature.

Ministers have given another contract extension to Avanti West Coast, saying the poorly performing rail operator had made improvements to services that were scaled back drastically in recent months, prompting chaos and a customer backlash.

Here is the news release from the Department for Transport. And here is our story by my colleague Peter Walker.

Christian Wolmar, a rail specialist, says this shows how the current rail franchise system does not give the government a proper alternative if a provider is underperforming. “Just nationalise the lot,” he says.

Good morning. Boris Johnson’s comeback prospects were never particularly strong at the start of the year and since Rishi Sunak unveiled his Northern Ireland protocol deal – which showed that Conservative MPs mostly want to move on from the Johnson-era war of attrition with the EU, as Johnson admitted himself in a revealing and defeatist speech – he has looked even more irrelevant to any serious debate about the party’s future.

But he still has an unrivalled ability to command media attention and, even though his appearance before the Commons privileges committee is more than 48 hours away, he is still dominating some of the front pages.

Two and a half weeks ago the committee published new evidence about how Johnson may have misled MPs about Partygate. “The evidence strongly suggests that breaches of guidance would have been obvious to Mr Johnson at the time he was at the gatherings,” the committee said in its report.

Today, ahead of his evidence session on Wednesday afternoon, Johnson will submit a dossier to the committee making the case for the defence. The committee is expected to publish it, possibly this afternoon. The document will reportedly contain evidence backing up Johnson’s claim that, when he told MPs he thought the Covid rules had been followed at all times at gatherings in No 10, he was doing so in good faith, on the basis of advice from his aides. But it will also reportedly argue that the investigation is unfair.

In its story, the Daily Telegraph quotes “a source close to Johnson’s defence team” as saying:

The committee will find Boris did not mislead parliament. It has to be based on the evidence which is totally in his favour.

He has always said he didn’t mislead parliament and now he will be shown to be right. He is in good spirits and he has a great defence. He is up for it and confident.

The lawyers will say a lot about how unfair the process has been. We think the committee moved the goalposts on the definition of contempt, by bringing in a new idea of recklessly misleading parliament rather than deliberately misleading parliament.

We think there is absolutely no precedent for that. We think they have changed the definition because they discovered there was no evidence that Boris acted wrongly in any way.

The dossier is also expected to include claims that past tweets by Harriet Harman, the Labour MP chairing the inquiry, show she is biased. Conor Burns, a prominent Johnson supporter, made this accusation in an interview last night, as my colleague Peter Walker reports.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Suella Braverman, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

2.30pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s outgoing first minister, gives a speech at the RSA in London.

3.45pm: Angus Robertson, the Scottish government’s constitution, external affairs and culture secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Scottish affairs committee.

Afternoon: The Commons privileges committee may publish the dossier from Boris Johnson rebutting claims he deliberately misled MPs about Partygate.

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