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The Privileges Committee’s questioning of Boris Johnson has constitutional significance 

The prime minister now faces an inquiry by the Commons Privileges Committee into whether he lied to parliament.

Boris Johnson has – at least for now – weathered Met fines and Sue Gray’s scathing critique of failures of leadership in No.10, but the prime minister now faces an inquiry by the Commons Privileges Committee into whether he lied to parliament. Hannah White considers the possible consequences of this latest probe for the prime minister.

Now that the police and civil service inquiries are complete, the seven MPs who make up the cross-party Privileges Committee can begin their inquiry. Unusually for a parliamentary committee, the Privileges Committee can summon MPs to appear before it, so if the backbenchers decide that – in addition to calling for the papers and records (and photos) gathered by Sue Gray – they need to hear from the prime minister in person, he will have no choice but to appear, or to be held in contempt of parliament.

Done well, forensic select committee scrutiny can be more challenging for witnesses than the partisan back and forth of questions following a statement in the House. The Privileges Committee – which like almost all Commons committees has a government majority – needs to avoid accusations of a whitewash by taking the opportunity to question Boris Johnson in person.

If the PM knowingly misled parliament then he could be held in contempt

Its task, as directed by the House of Commons on 21 April, is to decide whether Johnson misled the Commons in his various statements about partygate, and whether – if he did so – that amounts to a contempt of parliament. In making their determination they will need not only to focus on his precise words in response to specific questions but whether the totality of the prime minister’s assertions over several months were deliberately calculated to frustrate parliamentary scrutiny of events in No.10 during lockdown. Their answer to this question is of fundamental constitutional importance – if they believe that – on the balance of probabilities – the prime minister did mislead the House (and did so knowingly), then he has broken the fundamental convention of ministerial accountability to parliament which underpins its ability to hold government to account.

The Privileges Committee will report its conclusions to the House which will then vote on whether to endorse its findings and any recommended sanction. This is unlikely now to happen before the House returns from the summer recess, given that the inquiry cannot even begin until the committee’s membership is changed – the Commons first has to agree to replace the chair Chris Bryant with another Labour member for the duration of the inquiry (from which he has recused himself because of public comments he made about Johnson having lied).

There has been some debate about whether a finding against the prime minister and a sanction of suspension for 10 days or more could lead to the prime minister facing a recall petition – as would be the case if he were sanctioned in the same way by the Standards Committee. Although the answer is – purely technically – probably ‘no’ because of the way the relevant legislation is drafted and has previously been interpreted, the answer is also irrelevant because the political consequences of a finding against Johnson would kick in well before any recall petition had time to get its boots on. 

Ministerial code changes wouldn’t water down the consequences for misleading parliament  

The investigation into the PM by the Privileges Committee focuses on whether he may have committed a contempt of parliament by misleading it. But if the committee found that he had – and that he had done so knowingly – this would also mean that the prime minister had broken the ministerial code.

Friday’s announcement of changes to the ministerial code – among other things to introduce a wider range of possible sanctions that can be imposed against a minister found to be in breach – has prompted speculation that this is an attempt to water down the consequences of a procedure committee finding against the prime minister. But although the prime minister has formalised the discretion he already really exercised about the penalties he can impose on his ministers for breaches of different severity, the clause in the code which requires a minister who knowingly misleads parliament to offer their resignation remains unchanged. And the same point applies as to recall – if Johnson is found to have knowingly lied to parliament, it is unlikely he will be able to resist political calls for his resignation.

The members of the Privileges Committee are the latest set of unfortunates to be handed the unenviable task of deciding the fate of a sitting prime minister. Both the Met investigation and Sue Gray’s inquiry have come in for intense criticism, with complaints of a lack of transparency or inconsistency. The Privileges Committee must be careful not to fall foul of the same accusations. At all times too, its members must be aware of the constitutional significance of their inquiry.

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