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London: Not for the first time, and maybe not even the last, Boris Johnson’s political career is in tatters after a report found that he misled parliament over the Downing Street parties scandal.
Johnson stood down as an MP late on Saturday (AEST) and launched a blistering attack on his former right-hand man who is now in his old job, Rishi Sunak. He was forced to resign as prime minister less than a year ago after being caught out telling a string of porkie pies. Almost 20 years ago he was sacked from the frontbench for lying about an affair.
Never say good-bye: Boris Johnson.Credit: AP
He was once sacked as a newspaper journalist for inventing a quote and falsely attributing it to his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas.
But ultimately, like his tin-eared resignation in Downing Street last July, it was all about himself.
There was no humility. Once again, it was everyone else’s fault. The House of Commons, no less, had conspired against him.
This from a man whose entire career has operated on the basis that the rules and codes of behaviour don’t apply to him. Now it’s caught up with him.
The bitter, raging former prime minister accused the Privileges’ Committee of “egregious bias” after it recommended that he should be suspended for more than 10 days, which would be enough to trigger a byelection.
So Johnson has instead resigned 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”.
But he does have at least one point. Ultimately, it was a cross-party group of seven MPs (although the majority of whom were Conservative) who determined his future. He says they were “determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament”, which he said set an “unsettling” and undemocratic precedent.
After everything the British people have endured in the past four years, perhaps it should have been the people who determined Johnson’s fate once and for all. His loyalists (there are still plenty) remain convinced he was popular, was badly wronged, and voters would reflect that.
We will now never know. But one suspects they were, to borrow from Australian prime minister Paul Keating, sitting on their verandas with their baseball bats.
The truth is there is little sympathy in Downing Street or among most cabinet ministers to Johnson’s woes and many will not be sad to see the back of him, at least in parliament.
His departure will trigger a byelection in his seat, which he held with a 7000 majority at the last election and was already high on Labour’s target list.
In a day of high drama the Tories will also have to defend the seat of Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries in Mid Bedfordshire, after she also resigned having not been given a peerage on Johnson’s prime ministerial resignation honours list.
Unsurprisingly for someone whose future has not been decided by the great unwashed, Johnson indicated that he was planning to return to politics and said that he had left parliament only “for now at least”.
Already the speculation is Johnson wanted Dorries’ safer seat but the Conservative Party is expected to block him from standing because it wants a local candidate.
In Johnson’s prime ministerial 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. He knighted the former cabinet ministers Jacob Rees-Mogg and Simon Clarke and handed peerages to several Downing Street aides. His former home secretary, Priti Patel, was made a dame.
Johnson said the report he had received from the committee on Friday was “riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice” but under their “absurd and unjust” process he had no ability to challenge anything they said.
“They should not be using their powers, which have only been very recently designed, to mount what is plainly a political hit job on someone they oppose,” he said.
The typical and utterly predictable departure shows Johnson has no intention of going quietly, but no intention of staying quiet either.
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