RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Boris was wrong. This wasn’t a kangaroo court, it was a lynch mob
Boris was wrong. This wasn’t a kangaroo court, it was a lynch mob. From the start of this absurd show trial, I told you they had already decided to string him up.
And even now, after he has been forced to resign not just as Prime Minister but also as an MP, they’re still not satisfied. Hanging’s too good for him? Not nearly enough. He has to be drawn and quartered, too.
Johnson’s resignation was never going to quench their thirst for blood. If he hadn’t stood down from Parliament, they intended all along to suspend him for more than the ten days which would force him to face a by-election.
In the event, they settled on an absurd 90-day suspension, a vindictive punishment out of all proportion to his alleged crimes, even though it was too late. We’re talking horses and stable doors here.
There are even moves to compound his humiliation by confiscating his Parliamentary pass and cancelling his ex-PM’s allowance.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Boris was wrong. This wasn’t a kangaroo court, it was a lynch mob
Before he quit, one member of the Privileges Committee, an SNP headbanger who had previously accused Boris of telling a ‘litany of lies’ over alleged Covid lockdown breaches, wanted him expelled immediately from the Commons.
The chairman, Labour grande dame Hattie Harman, had already delivered her verdict of guilty in advance on social media. She should never have been allowed to preside over a committee convened to decide his fate.
This rigged jury of Remainers and Boris-haters was an affront to natural justice. Even Tory Brexiteer Bernard Jenkin made no secret of his contempt for Johnson and had tried to prevent him heading up the Leave campaign in 2016.
Now Jenkin himself is accused of breaking lockdown rules by attending a birthday party in the Commons for his wife, at which both cake and wine were served.
Dear Pot, love Kettle.
He hasn’t denied it, so we must assume it’s true. In a court of law, this in itself would be enough for any genuinely impartial judge to overturn the verdict and order a mistrial.
The plain truth is that none of this would have stood up in a court of law. Hattie Harman would have had to recuse herself on grounds of bias, just as her Labour colleague Chris Bryant had the decency to do earlier.
A video grab of Boris Johnson looking at photos of himself in Downing Street on November 13 2021 in a Parliamentary Privilege’s Committee
For 14 months, Harman’s committee has been trying to find something, anything, to bring Boris down. In the end, it has been reduced to relying on anonymous written evidence of wrongdoing in No 10, unfounded assumptions and accusations that as Prime Minister he ‘deliberately’ misled the House.
Harman even moved the goalposts, so that Johnson could be punished for ‘inadvertently’ rather than deliberately misleading MPs.
Yet in order to prove that charge, they would have had to peer inside his head and read his mind. And to reach that conclusion, they would have to possess greater mind-reading powers than even the most gifted clairvoyant.
Perhaps Hattie’s been taking lessons from Little Britain’s stage hypnotist Kenny Craig.
Look into my eyes, Boris, look into the eyes. You’re back in the room.
Johnson had already put his hands up to inadvertently misleading them, but always maintained that, according to the advice of his officials, whatever gatherings he attended were within the Covid rules.
Given that his advisers were also present at these alleged ‘parties’, they must have thought that they — and he — were doing nothing illegal.
The Old Bill disagreed and issued 123 fixed penalty fines, including one to the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Even Tory Brexiteer Bernard Jenkin made no secret of his contempt for Johnson and had tried to prevent him heading up the Leave campaign in 2016
Now PM, Sunak has decided to throw Boris to the wolves. As I wrote on Tuesday, he should be careful what he wishes for. Who knows what incriminating ‘evidence’ might be uncovered when his own lockdown WhatsApp messages are examined. It could be Dishi Rishi’s turn in the ducking stool next.
As for Labour, gobby deputy leader Angela Rayner was first out of the blocks, damning Boris as a ‘liar and a law-breaker’. This is the same Ange Rayner who was photographed during Covid with her boss Keir Starmer drinking beer and wolfing down chicken tikka massala at an ‘after-work event’ in Durham, for which both were fortunate to escape sanction. (Courtesy of the local Plod, who took a far more lenient approach than that adopted towards Boris’s Downing Street by Dick of Dock Green’s Met.)
What was that about pots and kettles? One rule for Labour, another for ‘Tory scum’?
The overwhelming stench of hypocrisy coming out of Westminster is even more toxic than the Great Stink of 1858, which led to the construction of London’s sewage system after the smell of effluent wafting off the Thames forced MPs to retreat from Parliament with handkerchiefs covering their noses and mouths.
Today, the effluent is coming from the mouths of MPs determined to bury Boris once and for all. To paraphrase the 19th-century Whig MP and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: There is no spectacle more ridiculous as the British political class in one of its periodic fits of morality.
I’ll leave it to others to pick over every cough and spit of the Privileges Committee’s answer to War And Peace — a 30,000-word, 108-page death warrant.
But a few of the conclusions leapt out at me. It turns out they decided to increase Boris’s suspension period to 90 days because he had the audacity to describe the Committee as a ‘kangaroo court’ and a ‘witch-hunt’.
This was part of a ‘campaign of abuse and intimidation’ and an affront to the dignity of the Hon Members involved, who clutched their skirts and had a fit of the vapours, like Victorian maiden aunts having their virginity called in to question.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: If anything has truly undermined our democracy, it’s this shameful political lynch mob
Apparently, Boris had ‘impugned the Committee and undermined the democratic process of the House’. He was also accused of briefing against them throughout. Hang on. From the off, the Committee has leaked like a sieve, as ‘sources close to’ poured anti-Boris poison into the ears of sympathetic Boys and Girls In The Bubble. We’re back in pots and kettles territory here.
As for ‘misleading the House’, MPs and ministers mislead the House frequently, often, to coin a phrase, inadvertently rather than deliberately.
Frankly, I’ve never understood why misleading the House is considered a hanging offence when misleading the public — which elects and pays the salaries of MPs — is par for the course. But the allegation which really struck me as risible was the claim that Boris had undermined the democratic process.
For seven years, since the Leave vote in 2016, MPs have been straining every sinew to undermine the democratic process by frustrating any attempt to implement a proper Brexit.
The saintly, impartial Hattie Harman was part of the People’s Vote movement, which sought to void the votes of more than 17 million people and force a second referendum.
If Labour wins the next election, the process of re-aligning Britain with the EU, in advance of a full return to membership, will begin in earnest.
And here’s the rub. They don’t want Boris around when that happens. He has never been forgiven for Brexit.
Even Jenkin, an original Brexiteer, thought ‘proper politicians’ — like, er, Bernard Jenkin — should head up the Leave campaign. He’d rather they lost than won under Boris, whom he considered a circus act.
Career politicians of all stripes have resented Boris ever since he entered Parliament. Despite his unrivalled record of winning elections, he wasn’t clubbable, not a Westminster insider.
They despise his popularity, especially in Labour’s Red Wall, and ability until now to get away with scrapes which would have sunk mere mortals.
The political class and the anti-Tory broadcast media were lining up to dance on Boris’s grave yesterday — none more so than Sky’s gorgeous, pouting political editor Beth Rigby.
Yes, the same Beth Rigby who was suspended for six months for attending her colleague Kay Burley’s boozy birthday party during a Covid lockdown.
Pots and, er . . . anyone?
Look, this isn’t a fan letter to Boris. I’m well aware of his shortcomings, although I’m eternally grateful to him for Getting Brexit Done, against all the odds, however imperfectly.
The proper place for removing him from office should have been at the ballot box and not at the soiled hands of an unholy alliance of die-hard Remainers and rogue Conservatives on a series of trumped-up charges of misleading Parliament.
If anything has truly undermined our democracy, it’s this shameful political lynch mob.
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