Saturday, September 03, 2022
Spending public money to get Boris Johnson off the hook
As if it was not bad enough that Boris Johnson flouted his own lockdown rules, that the Metropolitan police failed to investigate properly and let him off the hook, and that Johnson then misled Parliament about his activities, it turns out that the concerted Tory campaign to overturn a Parliamentary inquiry into the Prime Minister's conduct has been given a huge assist with £130,000 of taxpayer's money.
The Guardian reports that Johnson has been accused of trying to “intimidate and bully” an inquiry into claims he misled MPs over Downing Street parties, after No 10 took the highly unusual step of commissioning a senior QC to scrutinise the legal basis for the process at a public cost of almost £130,000.
The paper says that crossbench peer David Pannick has argued that the Commons committee on privileges and standards was “proposing to adopt an unfair procedure” in examining allegations that Johnson falsely told the Commons he knew nothing about lockdown-breaking gatherings:
Pannick said Johnson should be permitted a lawyer and any sanction on him for inadvertently misleading MPs “would be likely to have a chilling effect on ministerial comments in the house”.
But the 22-page document prompted puzzlement from legal and constitutional experts, who said Pannick was assessing a parliamentary process as if it was a judicial one. Downing Street has declined to release the “instructions to counsel”, which set out the basis for a barrister’s opinion.
While ministers routinely seek legal advice, Johnson will face any consequences from the inquiry as a backbench MP. His successor as prime minister, expected to be Liz Truss, will take over on Tuesday, with voting in the Tory leadership campaign having ended on Friday afternoon.
However, Downing Street argues that the inquiry relates to his conduct as prime minister and thus has wider consequences for government.
Government sources confirmed the contract to Pannick, via a firm of solicitors, is one totalling £129,700 for four months of “legal services” beginning in August, published on Friday.
In a highly choreographed process seemingly intended to discredit the inquiry before it begins in the coming weeks, Pannick’s findings were briefed to a handful of friendly newspapers on Thursday night, which ran stories describing the opinion as “devastating”.
Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who stepped back from leading the investigation over previous criticism of Johnson, said it appeared to be “an attempt to intimidate and bully the committee”.
Pannick, Bryant added, “does not acknowledge that the motion from the House of Commons setting up the inquiry does not refer to ‘knowingly misleading the house’ at all. It simply says, ‘misleading the house’. Second, he doesn’t seem to understand that lots of standards processes have changed over the last 20 years.
“We now have a process for ministers to formally correct the record when they have made an inadvertent error. Boris Johnson has not done that in relation to this. But ministers used this process 200 times this year.
“So the question of how culpable Boris Johnson is depends on several things, one of which might be whether he knowingly lied. One might be whether he was really careless about the truth. One might be whether he ever bothered to correct the record properly. All of those are in the mix.”
This Tory government has demonstrated a cavalier attitude to the use of public money, whether it is on giving PPE contracts to their friends at a cost of billions of pounds, or wasting it on vanity project such as the proposed bridge/tunnel between Scotland and Northen Ireland. It is no surprise therefore that they are now throwing taxpayer's cash at defending Johnson.
If only they would spend the money on helping people through the cost of living crisis instead.
The Guardian reports that Johnson has been accused of trying to “intimidate and bully” an inquiry into claims he misled MPs over Downing Street parties, after No 10 took the highly unusual step of commissioning a senior QC to scrutinise the legal basis for the process at a public cost of almost £130,000.
The paper says that crossbench peer David Pannick has argued that the Commons committee on privileges and standards was “proposing to adopt an unfair procedure” in examining allegations that Johnson falsely told the Commons he knew nothing about lockdown-breaking gatherings:
Pannick said Johnson should be permitted a lawyer and any sanction on him for inadvertently misleading MPs “would be likely to have a chilling effect on ministerial comments in the house”.
But the 22-page document prompted puzzlement from legal and constitutional experts, who said Pannick was assessing a parliamentary process as if it was a judicial one. Downing Street has declined to release the “instructions to counsel”, which set out the basis for a barrister’s opinion.
While ministers routinely seek legal advice, Johnson will face any consequences from the inquiry as a backbench MP. His successor as prime minister, expected to be Liz Truss, will take over on Tuesday, with voting in the Tory leadership campaign having ended on Friday afternoon.
However, Downing Street argues that the inquiry relates to his conduct as prime minister and thus has wider consequences for government.
Government sources confirmed the contract to Pannick, via a firm of solicitors, is one totalling £129,700 for four months of “legal services” beginning in August, published on Friday.
In a highly choreographed process seemingly intended to discredit the inquiry before it begins in the coming weeks, Pannick’s findings were briefed to a handful of friendly newspapers on Thursday night, which ran stories describing the opinion as “devastating”.
Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who stepped back from leading the investigation over previous criticism of Johnson, said it appeared to be “an attempt to intimidate and bully the committee”.
Pannick, Bryant added, “does not acknowledge that the motion from the House of Commons setting up the inquiry does not refer to ‘knowingly misleading the house’ at all. It simply says, ‘misleading the house’. Second, he doesn’t seem to understand that lots of standards processes have changed over the last 20 years.
“We now have a process for ministers to formally correct the record when they have made an inadvertent error. Boris Johnson has not done that in relation to this. But ministers used this process 200 times this year.
“So the question of how culpable Boris Johnson is depends on several things, one of which might be whether he knowingly lied. One might be whether he was really careless about the truth. One might be whether he ever bothered to correct the record properly. All of those are in the mix.”
This Tory government has demonstrated a cavalier attitude to the use of public money, whether it is on giving PPE contracts to their friends at a cost of billions of pounds, or wasting it on vanity project such as the proposed bridge/tunnel between Scotland and Northen Ireland. It is no surprise therefore that they are now throwing taxpayer's cash at defending Johnson.
If only they would spend the money on helping people through the cost of living crisis instead.
