Boris Johnson starts high-stakes ‘Partygate’ grilling

• Boris Johnson vows to fight to save his political career.
• After admitting he misled Parliament about Partygate.
• Johnson was fined for attending a meeting where he was given a birthday cake.

At a hearing into “Partygate,” one of the scandals that toppled his administration last year, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to fight to save his political career.

In a crowded committee room with lawyers on either side of him, Johnson began a four-hour grilling on Tuesday afternoon by MPs on the Privileges Committee.

His premiership was overthrown in 2022 after it came to light that dozens of social gatherings were held under his watch, some of which he personally attended, at a time when Covid-19 was preventing Britons from seeing their loved ones.

Johnson admits that he misled Parliament about the existence of those parties, although he maintains that he did it unintentionally.

However, the parliamentary investigation into whether he lied on purpose in front of the House has the potential to endanger his career; if the committee recommends a protracted suspension from the House, he might be required to run in a by-election in his hotly contested constituency.

“I’m here to say to you, hand on heart, that I did not lie to the House,” Johnson said during his opening statement on Wednesday. He attacked the testimony of his former top adviser turned political foe, Dominic Cummings, saying “he has every motive to lie.”

Additionally, he argued that it was “nonsense” to depend on images of Johnson exiting drinks because they depicted socially awkward meetings for which he was not given a ticket.

Johnson’s refutation of the committee’s assertion that the former prime minister would have known that the rules and regulations he established were being disregarded is at the heart of his denial.

The evidence “strongly suggests that breaches of guidance would have been obvious to Mr. Johnson at the time he was at the gatherings,” according to the committee’s most recent report on the probe.

Infractions of pandemic restrictions resulted in more than 100 penalties being issued by London’s Metropolitan Police to Downing Street employees while the nation was occasionally in varied states of lockdown.

Johnson was fined for attending a meeting where he was given a birthday cake, and Rishi Sunak, his then-chancellor and current prime minister, was also penalized.

Johnson wrote in a lengthy testimony submitted to the committee earlier this week that, when his false statements were made to lawmakers, “they were made in good faith and on the basis of what I honestly knew and believed at the time.”

“At none of these events did I stay for more than half an hour, and sometimes far less. I was extremely busy. I might raise a glass to honour a colleague, but that was it,” he added.

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