Former prime minister attacks Rishi Sunak and lockdown parties committee
Boris Johnson stood down as an MP and launched a blistering attack on Rishi Sunak’s government after an investigation found that he misled parliament over the Downing Street parties scandal.
The former prime minister accused the privileges committee of “egregious bias” after it recommended that he should be suspended for more than ten days, which would be enough to trigger a by-election.
Johnson decided instead to resign as Tory MP for Uxbridge & South Ruislip with immediate effect, accusing the committee of mounting a “witch-hunt” and describing it as a “kangaroo court”.
Johnson in the Cabinet Room of No 10 on his birthday in 2020, one of the gatherings that were investigated
He said that the cross-party group of seven MPs, the majority of whom are Conservative, was “determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament”, which he said set an “unsettling” and undemocratic precedent.
In the statement Johnson also issued a vitriolic attack on Sunak as he accused him of abandoning the pledges on which he had won the 2019 election. He called for cuts to business and personal taxes and for the party to make the most of Brexit, adding: “We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government.” He accused Sunak, in effect, of betraying his legacy, claiming that he had “passively abandoned” a free-trade deal with the US and “junked” policies, including support for first-time homebuyers, a bonfire of EU laws and new legislation to protect animals.
“Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do,” he said. “We need to show how we are making the most of Brexit and we need in the next months to be setting out a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda. We need to cut business and personal taxes — and not just as pre-election gimmicks — rather than endlessly putting them up.
“We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million people. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit.”
Celebrating the Olympics in 2012, when he was mayor of London
With David Cameron the same year, seven years before he became prime minister
Johnson’s departure will trigger a by-election in his seat, which he held with a 7,000 majority at the last election and was already high on Labour’s target list.
The Tories will also have to defend Nadine Dorries’s Mid Bedfordshire seat after she also resigned earlier in the day having not been given a peerage on Johnson’s prime ministerial resignation honours list.
Johnson indicated that he is planning to return to politics and said that he had left parliament only “for now at least”. The Conservative Party is expected to block him from standing in Dorries’s seat because it wants a local candidate.
In Johnson’s resignation list, more than 40 of his closest aides and allies were given honours and peerages, including several implicated in the Downing Street parties scandal.
Johnson also knighted the former cabinet ministers Jacob Rees-Mogg and Simon Clarke and handed peerages to Downing Street aides. Priti Patel was made a dame.
The former prime minister claimed that the privileges committee had been determined to force him out of parliament.
Source: The Times
