Boris Johnson!

Another suspension !

The gist of Johnson's defence seems to be that "the guidance" was that they could do whatever they wanted.

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As an interesting aside, the rebellion against the Windsor framework fizzled out.

He picked the wrong horse in that one, another nail in his legacy!

As for the "evidence" he is giving, it's full of stammering because his brain can't manufacture the bull shit fast enough to get to his lips in time.😁

The gist of Johnson’s defence seems to be that “the guidance” was that they could do whatever they wanted.

No his defence is that they were working in a cramped space where social distancing was next to impossible and had they implemented it to the letter of the guidance it would have seriously hindered the operation of government. I don't necessarily disagree with that. At a time of national crisis I would expect the people in govt to take some personal risks in the national interest. Obviously that doesn't extend to having parties but you can see how staff in number 10 might have thought the rules didn't apply to them. If they weren't social distancing in the course of their work, then it makes it pretty pointless in other circustances.

Johnson and Bernard Jenkin don't seem to like each other do they?

It’s a load of bollocks this partygate stuff. I dislike Johnson as much as the next person but raking over this stuff is not particularly important.

This isn't about partygate, it is about whether or not he deliberately misled parliament. And that is very important.

you can see how staff in number 10 might have thought the rules didn’t apply to them.

by that token you could say the same of staff in care homes, hospitals, various essential and safety-critical industries. They didn't have parties because the culture in these organisations is very different to that No.10 being set from the top.

Not allowed at my workplace and the whole long hours hard work balderdash is just that - balderdash

He knows it, we know it, the committee know it

"Parties" is irrelevant.  Gathering for social purposes had firm rules and they were clearly not followed as everyone can see.

its not work when you are getting pissed and no work is being done

"If they weren’t social distancing in the course of their work, then it makes it pretty pointless in other circumstances."

does that apply to hospitals?  We were catching covid from patients because we had to be close to them and passing it around colleagues because we had to be close to them.  does that mean we could get pissed up together after shift?

"

does that mean we could get pissed up together after shift?

Why not if it didn't create any extra risk of spreading the disease? I wouldn't have had a problem with it.

it is about whether or not he deliberately misled parliament.

PMs and ministers mislead parliament all the bloody time. Why is this getting special treatment? Mainly because it helps the people who don't like Johnson. Meanwhile when we're all fixated on this soap opera, the govt is doing all manner of things which we don't seem particularly interested in. 🤷‍♂️

Johnson claims it is “unlikely” that he said, at a particular leaving do, that it was the “the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now”.

Weasel words.  He knows damn well he said it and he knows the committee have sworn statements he did so no denial just "unlikely"  I've done loads of unlikely stuff in my life

If he was still PM I would agree, but he’s not. There’s a remote chance he could be PM again and if that becomes a possibility the voters will have all the info they need to make a decision on whether he should be.

To be fair, I did rob a bank, but I'm no longer in the bank, and banks have all the info they need to make a decision on whether to let me into banks in the future. This "prosecution" business is just mudslinging by my critics.

Johnson and Bernard Jenkin don’t seem to like each other do they?

It’s not personal… Johnson is taking the piss out of the standards committee, its members, and the whole process. He’s insulting them. And parliament. But no surprise there.

They like a good piss up these Ministers don't they. Can't recall ever having alcohol on the 'job'.

Why not if it didn’t create any extra risk of spreading the disease?

Because it does increase risk.  the longer the exposure the higher the risk.  Being pissed makes you lax about precautions

No one seems to have picked up as well that they should have had masks on if they couldn't socially distance

If he was still PM I would agree, but he’s not. There’s a remote chance he could be PM again and if that becomes a possibility the voters will have all the info they need to make a decision on whether he should be.

He is however a Member of Parliament. He is bound by the rules of the house, as is every other MP.

I dislike Johnson as much as the next person but raking over this stuff is not particularly important.

Missleading parliament (again) and then lying about it, you see as "not particularly important"?

He should be heavily fined and banned from working in public office ever again, as a bare minimum.

Imagine if you did something at work that warranted a disciplinary investigation, contrary to your own policy and then you lied during the investigation.

You would be fired, no questions asked.

Aside from setting a very dangerous precident for how much crap MP's can get away with, he was the PM at the time.

Johnson is very good at remembering what he doesn't remember.

Why not if it didn’t create any extra risk of spreading the disease? I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

Aw thanks Dazh. But pretty sure your standards, the rules and guidance as they were laid out at the time, and the benefit of hindsight aren’t under scrutiny today. This is about standards in, and misleading of Parliament. Thanks anyway.

He just deployed the Mis-Remembering line.

Mis-remembering is only a word that politicians use when they have be caught out. No-one else in normal life ever admits to mis-remembering.

PMs and ministers mislead parliament all the bloody time.

Except they don't. They can give all sorts of rubbish opinions on whether something is a good idea or not, announce plans that will never realistically happen, etc. But they can't lie on a matter of fact.

No-one else in normal life ever admits to mis-remembering.

He'll say it's his 'near-death'* covid experience. Stuffed his brain up (although he's as sharp as a tack when it comes to being PM again).

*apparently not anywhere near death.

I am sitting here getting angrier and angrier and I am only looking at the guardian live feed in text.

What I went thru during this period trying to keep folk safe and this clown just ignored the rules completely

I'm not even looking at the Guardian feed. Only so much bloviating and lying I can take of an afternoon.

I hope they send the barsteward down!

Ohhhh, watching him talk makes me so angry. I should stop watching the feed.

So what's the outcome of this, it's OK to not remember, it's all guidance and he believes what he's done, so it's all OK. He's very good at remembering bullshit !

I think they well censure him but short of the ten day suspension needed for a recall petition and probable bye election.  I think thats all they can do to keep the tories on the committee onside as they are loyal to the party if not him and don't want a bye election

They like a good piss up these Ministers don’t they.

It explains quite a lot looking back.

When it comes down to it, he's either lying his arse off, or he's an absolute imbecile that couldn't even interpret the guidance/ rules he was telling the nation, repeatedly.

I hope that either/ both of these prospects make him unfit to be a PM again.

It's just not cricket if they let him off to avoid a bye election .

“I can’t name any of the officials that gave me the advice, they went to another school.”

It's fascinating how he'll look to blame advisors for not advising him correctly.

He's got very few friends remaining in the current tory leadership and has called out Rishi on two different things today. They'll throw him under the bus I reckon, ten day censure plus bye-election. He's the dead cat to avoid anyone looking a bit more closely at Rishi (or his taxes)

Oh, he’s changed his story… he didn’t receive advice that “all guidance was followed”… but it was his “lived experience” that they were, and he can’t remember anyone advising him otherwise. Can’t argue with that.

"have to get a huge amount of business done"

We all saw the business they were getting done. Siphoning off vast amounts of public cash to themselves and their mates, Matt Hancock was certainly up to a lot of business in his office, and Johnson seems to have been in the business of hosting numerous piss ups which I suppose does at least prove that Government can organise a piss up in an office, if not a brewery.

What a total farce.

Purely coincidentally, Sunak has just released all the information on his tax affairs!

Obviously nothing to do with any other things in the news today.😂

It is amazing how sometimes his memory can recall exact decisions made within a 10min window over two years ago. And yet on other questions, he cannot recall anything useful.

He does love an interruption. The claims he had been "repeatedly assured" the rules were not broken on several occasions when he spoke in the Commons turn out to be vague, or just utter tosh. Unnamed advisors, wiffle-waffle. It's going to give us PTSD listening to this.

p.s. Sunak choosing to try and bury his tax returns today, whilst everyone is watching this unfold. Edit, as pointed out by @Poopscoop

It's not going well for him.
He's getting agitated and Bernard Jenkin is on again.

Uncomfortable viewing, but difficult to look away, isn't? If anything, this is nothing but absurd and proves to my mind how we've arrived to a point in public and political discourse which is no longer based on reality, but on consensus-based lying: we know he's lying, he knows he's lying, the panel knows he's lying — quite simply, there can be no doubt in any reasonable mind that he's not lying. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has debased everything he's touched, including this ridiculous farce of an inquiry.

He is getting rattled, you can see that he is genuinely confused as to why people would question him. He is far too used to getting his own way.

Im no royalist but this is respect and dignity... and the day after one of their parties...

Really wish hed just go, he's an absolutely vile person who's pretty much ruined the country, created hate and division and is an embarrassment to the UK...

what was that he was saying about not wearing masks indoors....

It is amazing how sometimes his memory can recall exact decisions made within a 10min window over two years ago. And yet on other questions, he cannot recall anything useful.

It's either an astonishingly selective memory or, much more likely, he's simply lying.

'Respect for this committee and parliament'.
Really??

He is getting a bit of a kicking isn't he?  Thats the impression I get from the text.  The contempt the committee have for him is clear

The faces of his smug legal team are starting to annoy me.

So he won't denounce anyone calling it a kangaroo court, because they're obviously going to find him not guilty as the breaches are all nonsense. So if/when they find against him, do we end up in a Trump style scenario of insurrection towards due process?

The faces of his smug legal team are starting to annoy me.

The faces of his tax-payer funded legal team?

He has not actually said he doesn’t think it’s a witch hunt or kangaroo court, apparently waiting to get the decision to make up his mind. Not likely to make the committee happy

He’s got very few friends remaining in the current tory leadership and has called out Rishi on two different things today. They’ll throw him under the bus I reckon, ten day censure plus bye-election.

I said something similar yesterday, he's only influential in a narrow and getting narrower part of the party who still think they can ride his coat tails to the trough. If they get rid of him then he loses all that. He'll still bluster, and show up on GB News to tell them that the Tories aren't nasty enough, but the people who listen to that aren't going to vote for anyone else unless there's a UKIP2.0.

Even the after dinner speaking circuit might prove less lucrative than he thought, how many of us would sit through this crap?

Poopscoop
Full Member

When it comes down to it, he’s either lying his arse off, or he’s an absolute imbecile that couldn’t even interpret the guidance/ rules he was telling the nation, repeatedly.

Though he's also told the committee under oath that he fully understood the rules, making the only viable "I am an imbecile" defence "I am too stupid to even realise that I'm stupid", he can't plead known idiocy.

And I think he's just now confirmed another misleading of parliament? Pretty sure he told parliament that he had received guidance that all advice was followed, now he's saying under oath that he didn't.

He’s claiming that he still believes that all guidance was followed… at events people were fined for attending. I’m surprised at that. But it’s hard to argue against what someone believes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. They can believe (or claim to believe) anything, no “evidence” can prove they don’t believe what they say, only that the claimed belief is nonsensical.

EDIT: summing up… he just keeps saying “what I believe” or “what I believed” over and over again

EDIT2: sorry, that wasn’t summing up… just a clipping from earlier

Even the after dinner speaking circuit might prove less lucrative than he thought, how many of us would sit through this crap

He'll have to struggle by on the £115k we'll pay him every year. Tough, I know.

The faces of his smug legal team are starting to annoy me.

Not a bad gig though.

BJ: "So what's your device?"

Expensive team of lawyers: "Just lie or say you can't remember."

BJ: "Great, will do!"

Wow, that point!

If the result exonerates me: not a kangaroo court.
If the result implicates me: a kangaroo court.

The guy behind him in the round glasses expression summed it up.

Even the after dinner speaking circuit might prove less lucrative than he thought, how many of us would sit through this crap?

If you've read Jeremy Vine's version of events on the after dinner circuit, there are plenty of braying, pissed buffoons who would pay handsomely for the BJoris "experience".

fatmountain
Free Member
Wow, that point!

If the result exonerates me: not a kangaroo court.
If the result implicates me: a kangaroo court.

The guy behind him in the round glasses expression summed it up.

Amazing eh? Right out of the Trump playbook too.

Questions have now concluded.

Ms Harman now invites Mr Johnson to make “any final points” that he hasn’t already mentioned or have not come up in the committee’s question.

“Thank you, I have very much enjoyed our discussion,” Mr Johnson said, to a brief outburst of laughter.

“I genuinely think it has been a useful discussion and I hope it’s clear to the committee what was in my heart and in my mind.”

Yes it's pretty damn clear.
What the 'committee' do about it remains to be seen.

Seems like "thanking and appreciating" colleagues is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I think the really tricky part for him is that it seems the “assurances” he said he was given in HOC were given by political media advisor appointees without trying to find out from anyone with some Parliamentary legal expertise. I think that’s why Jenkin made the point so forcefully as by glibly saying this he could be “reckless”

Well, this shall from hence be known as the "I believe" defence.

"Sorry officer, I believed that it was ok to shoot the neighbour over his diabolical parking habits as no-one had advised me otherwise."

And they say ignorance is no defence! Pfft!

I like how drinking at work is a total non-issue because it wasn't explicitly prohibited by the rules/guidance. Where as to most people in most workplaces, the presence of booze would mean a social event. So it just seems odd that booze isn't the smoking gun it should be.

Ione Wells

Political correspondent

Some of Johnson’s loyal Tory supporters were heckling when the session got particularly heated – including MPs Lia Nici and James Duddridge, who could be heard hearing telling the ex-PM not to "rise" to the MP questioning him.

The session somewhat crescendoed towards the end – rattling Johnson and his supporters more as it went on.

When Sir Charles Walker was questioning Johnson on whether or not it was fair that some people had described the committee as a "kangaroo court", Nici piped up again, saying: "He’s not said that" and "It's not for him to say."

In most work places the presence of booze would be a sacking event especially if you were working at the time

He’ll have to struggle by on the £115k we’ll pay him every year. Tough, I know.

Technically that's an expenses limit.

So he can claim back the taxi fare if he's asked to open a local swimming pool.

Having said that I expect he's the type to find he needs to open the pool of a 5* hotel in Barbados.

Where as to most people in most workplaces, the presence of booze would mean a social event charge of gross misconduct