British MPs have decided to seize the “Committee of Privileges”, which will in turn investigate this scandal around the parties organized in Downing Street during the successive confinements linked to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Boris Johnson is still not out of the woods. Already fined for breaches of the rules aimed at preventing contagion to Covid-19 during parties organized in the circles of power in 2020 and 2021, the British Prime Minister is now the target of an investigation opened by deputies, Thursday, April 21. It must determine whether he knowingly misled Parliament in his explanations in this case.
By consensus, without even formally voting, they decided to go to the “Privileges Committee”. This opens a new front in this affair, likely in the long term to force Boris Johnson to resign. The Ministerial Code provides that a minister who has knowingly misled Parliament must resign. The parliamentary inquiry will not begin until the police investigation is complete and senior civil servant Sue Gray, in charge of an internal inquiry, has delivered her final report.
The motion at the origin of parliamentary procedure “seeks to uphold the simple principle of honesty, integrity and telling the truth” in British political life, said the leader of the Labor opposition, Keir Starmer, who originated the text. “We know the prime minister himself broke the law”he added.
This is yet another setback for the 57-year-old Conservative leader: far from turning the page on the crisis, he finds himself with a third investigation, after others in administrative and police proceedings in progress, despite its large majority in the House of Commons, its initial desire to oppose the procedure and then a maneuver to push it back, abandoned at the last minute. On many occasions before Parliament, the Prime Minister assured that all the rules had been respected, an assertion contradicted by the fine imposed on him.