Boris Johnson ‘very much’ looking forward to partygate grilling by MPs as he says committee has ‘not a shred of evidence’
Boris Johnson has said he is “very much” looking forward to appearing before MPs investigating whether he knowingly misled parliament over partygate.
The former prime minister earlier on Tuesday said he accepts he misled parliament over partygate but insisted his statements were made “in good faith”.
On the eve of his appearance in front of the privileges committee on Wednesday, he said: “I look forward very much to the committee session tomorrow.
“I believe that the evidence conclusively shows that I did not knowingly or recklessly mislead parliament.
“The committee has produced not a shred of evidence to show that I have.”
Mr Johnson and his team are understood to be “very confident” ahead of his appearance.
The former prime minister earlier accused the privileges committee of having gone “significantly beyond its terms of reference” with its probe into whether he knowingly lied to MPs.
In his written evidence to the committee, published on Tuesday, Mr Johnson said it was “unprecedented and absurd” to claim that relying on assurances from “trusted advisers” was “in some way reckless”.
But the committee hit back with a scathing statement which said the submission contains “no new evidence” in his defence, and an earlier version had to be re-submitted because of “errors and typos”.
Boris Johnson to appear in front of the privileges committee from 2pm tomorrow – watch and follow live on Sky News
Boris Johnson pictured at one of the Downing Street gatherings
The committee launched its probe in the wake of Sue Gray’s partygate report, which blamed a “failure of leadership and judgement” for the lockdown-busting parties that took place in Number 10 during the COVID pandemic.
The report criticised the culture that existed “at the heart of government” at a time when the rest of the country was ordered to follow strict social distancing guidelines.
Mr Johnson said he accepts the House of Commons “was misled by my statements that the rules and guidance had been followed completely at No 10”.
“But when the statements were made, they were made in good faith and on the basis of what I honestly knew and believed at the time,” he added.
Other key points in Mr Johnson’s evidence:
• Mr Johnson insisted that other than the “assertions of the discredited Dominic Cummings”, his former aide, there is “not a single document that indicates that I received any warning or advice that any event broke” the rules
• He rejected the committee’s belief that the evidence strongly suggested breaches of coronavirus rules would have been “obvious” to him while prime minister, calling the allegation “illogical”
• He argued that some of those who attended the events “wished me ill and would denounce me if I concealed the truth”
• He criticised the “highly partisan tone and content” in the committee’s damning interim report
• Referring to allegations of rule-breaking, the ex-prime minister said that any lack of social distancing in the “old, cramped London townhouse” of Number 10 was not necessarily a breach of guidance
• He said that while he personally attended five of the events considered by the committee, he “honestly believed that these events were lawful work gatherings”
• While he said he accepts the conclusion of the Met Police investigation, he said that it “remains unclear” to him – and possibly Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – about why they were fined for breaching lockdown laws
• He did not deny joking that he was at “probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now” during a boozy mid-pandemic leaving do, but said he did not recall making the remark
Mr Johnson conceded in his evidence that his statements to parliament “did not turn out to be correct”, but insisted he corrected the record at “the earliest opportunity”.
“I did not intentionally or recklessly mislead the House on December 1 2021, December 8 2021, or on any other date,” he said.
“I would never have dreamed of doing so.”
Members of the COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group called his defence “sickening” and called for him to resign as an MP.
Becky Kummer, a spokesperson for the group, said it’s “obvious” that the former leader “deliberately misled parliament”, adding: “Far worse though is the lies he deliberately told to families like mine, after failing to protect our loved ones. His claim that he did so in ‘good faith’ is sickening.”
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Partygate inquiry explained
The 52-page defence dossier was published a day before Mr Johnson faces a live grilling by the cross-party group of MPs in a hearing that could decide his political fate.
In response to his evidence, the committee said Mr Johnson’s legal argument “contains no new documentary evidence” and that it had to be resubmitted on Tuesday because of “a number of errors and typos”.
What is the committee investigating?
If Mr Johnson fails to convince the committee he did not deliberately mislead the Commons, he could be found to have committed a contempt of parliament.
A suspension of more than 10 days could result in a high-profile by-election in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat – though MPs will have to vote on any recommendations.
Boris Johnson at a gathering on 14 January 2021
In an interim report into its investigation published earlier this month, the committee said the evidence it had gathered “strongly suggests” it would have been “obvious” to Mr Johnson that COVID rules were being breached at Downing Street gatherings he attended.
It said it had identified at least four occasions where Mr Johnson may have misled MPs, which will form the backbone of its investigation.
The first instance was when Mr Johnson told MPs in December 2021 that no rules or guidance had been broken – when subsequent investigations by Ms Gray and the Met Police found otherwise.
The second occasion came when the former prime minister failed to tell the Commons about his own knowledge of gatherings where the rules or guidance had been broken, when evidence showed he had been present at some of them.
Mr Johnson could be suspended from the Commons if he is found to have misled the House
Thirdly, the committee said MPs may have been misled when Mr Johnson claimed on 8 December 2021 he had been given “repeated assurances” that rules were not broken.
However, these assurances only applied to one event on 18 December 2020 and not to compliance with the rules and guidance more generally.
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Finally, the committee said Mr Johnson gave the impression that he could only answer MPs’ questions once the investigation by Ms Gray had determined whether rules or guidance had actually been broken.
“While repeatedly making that statement to the House he appears to have had personal knowledge he did not reveal,” the committee said.
Read more:
The key parts of Boris Johnson’s partygate evidence
How he defends each of his partygate statements to parliament
As well as being required to be truthful to parliament at all times, MPs are also encouraged to correct the record at the earliest opportunity if they have inadvertently said something wrong.
The committee said in its interim findings that Mr Johnson “did not use the well-established procedures of the House” to correct the record, as is convention.
Watching a live drone feed, it was possible to make out three people running down a street in a frontline town in northeastern Ukraine.
“Are they Russians?” I asked a Ukrainian soldier, who was also on the ground in Vovchansk and was showing us the footage from a secret location as we spoke to him via video link from outside the town.
“Yes, yes,” said Denys, 42, the commander of a reconnaissance unit.
“They come in groups like this of three to five soldiers.”
Follow war latest: US confirms aid arriving on frontline
Other footage from Monday shared with Sky News appeared to be of more Russian troops inside the town – just three days after Russia launched a surprise assault across its border into Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.
Sky News has verified the location of the images.
“They are advancing in a residential area of Vovchansk and moving into people’s houses,” Denys said.
“This is just the first wave… They’re testing our defences, they’re preparing their artillery. When they completely enter the town, they’ll bring in their reserves.”
Sky News has verified the location of the images
Denys was speaking from a position where he and his team were operating their drone, hunting for Russian targets for Ukrainian forces to strike.
Asked what their main task was, he spun the camera he was speaking to us on around to let one of his soldiers – he described them as his “fellow hero brothers” – answer.
“We will fight under these difficult conditions by whatever means,” said the serviceman, called Andrii.
“We simply have no other choice because behind us are our homes, our families, our children.”
Russian forces have unleashed a ferocious barrage of fire against the town, using a combination of airstrikes, gliding bombs, armed drones and heavy artillery.
Another feed, shared by Denys, captured apocalyptic scenes of smoke spiralling into the air from multiple impact sites across Vovchansk.
“The town was not prepared for this bombardment,” he said.
Drone footage shows the Russian assault on Vovchansk
Asked how dangerous it was for him and his team, Denys panned around his makeshift base.
“If they target us with a guided bomb… it’ll be a mass grave,” he said, smiling.
Denys had been a senior police officer and then a lawyer before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Then, like many civilians, he volunteered to serve to defend his country and has been fighting ever since.
But, in an unusual move for a member of the military, Denys has publicly expressed frustration at what he believes was a failure by his own side to ensure Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia was better defended by landmines and fortifications.
This was despite the Ukrainian military repelling an initial assault by Russia against the Kharkiv region in the first months of the war.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
On Friday “we saw the first breaches of the state border line by enemy armoured vehicles – the initial rush,” he said. “They passed without encountering any mined positions.”
Explaining why he had chosen to speak out about his concerns, he said: “We’re fighting for freedom and truth. We defend our interests, the interests of our state, voluntarily. And we believe that this truth needs to be spoken.”
Having fought to defend Kharkiv once already, Denys said he and his team now “feel some deja vu”.
He added: “It’s shocking. We’re having to defend ourselves again – losing territory and the lives of soldiers.”
He also said, this time around, the Russians were more prepared.
“The enemy prepared their FPV [attack drone] forces,” he said. “They loaded up with an incredible amount of MLRS [multiple launch rocket systems] and artillery.”
As well as capturing images of Russian troops on the ground, the drone footage also showed Ukraine fighting back.
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Russian forces bear down on Vovchansk
One clip was of what Denys said was a group of Russian troops on the edge of Vovchansk, carrying a wounded soldier on a stretcher.
His team relayed the coordinates of the location to another unit. Moments later, what looks to be a Ukrainian strike chugs up smoke in the area of the Russian position.
Read more:
Russia ‘advancing from multiple positions’
Putin seizes chance to hit Kharkiv
As he prepared to fight into the night, Denys had a message for Ukraine’s top commanders.
“Trust your soldiers, your officers. Trust those on the ground. Give them the opportunity, give them help, give them the chance to defend this land,” he said.
“There are many people here who voluntarily came to give their lives for this country. The command should respect them, trust them, and allow them to do their job.”
Divyendra Jadoun is proud of his professional alias: the Indian Deepfaker.
“I know we do deepfakes,” he tells Sky News. “Why would I use something else?”
And Jadoun’s services have been in demand recently, as India holds elections – often billed as the biggest democratic election on the planet.
Deepfakes have been a feature, in some surprising ways. On occasion, they have been malicious. Bollywood actors have been falsely depicted criticising PM Narendra Modi, or endorsing a political party.
Jadoun says: “We received a lot of requests, from November, October. And out of those requests, around 45 to 50% requests were for unethical [deepfakes]. And these are two kinds of requests.
“One is to swap the face of the political leader and put it into some controversial video that might harm his image. The second type of unethical [deepfake] is to create the clone of, the voice of the opponent leader and make him say something that he has never said.”
“This is the first time that we are going to see the deployment of deepfakes on a large scale. Even for us, it’s a new thing.
“We do not know how much it will impact or whether it will have an impact or not.”
Pic: AP
Others point to the low numbers of views those deepfake videos tend to receive, along with the speed at which they get debunked – and say that the impact of deepfakes has been, perhaps unexpectedly, positive.
“There was a fear that deepfake type of things would be more used for adversarial content, whereas what we are seeing is the opposite,” explains Joyojeet Pal, associate professor of information at the University of Michigan.
“The artificially generated content is much more being used by the campaigns of politicians in their own interest.”
Witness the resurrection of M Karunanidhi, a politician who died in 2018. A deepfake of him was created by technologist Senthil Nayagam and subsequently put on the campaign trail, endorsing various candidates.
“We accidentally started the trend with this video,” Nayagam tells Sky News.
Read more from Sky News:
India and Canada relations at their lowest point
Narendra Modi reported to Electoral Commission
Pic: AP
The Indian Deepfaker has worked on another system that shows the potential innovation of deepfakes.
“We are doing a conversational agent where you will get a call in the voice of a leader. It will be saying that I am an AI-generated avatar of this leader, and he will be taking the name of the person,” he says.
“He will be asking ‘What are your local issues in your area?’ or ‘What are your suggestions to the government?’ – and every call will be recorded.
“It will then be transcribed and it will be filtered out based on different questions, so that the government or the political parties can make manifestos or can create schemes according to the problem.”
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From April: Is India’s Narendra Modi popular?
There are still pitfalls. Jadoun is worried about deepfakes spreading through the messaging system WhatsApp rather than the open internet, where they are easier to debunk. WhatsApp is where more traditional misinformation has spread, according to Amber Sinha.
“I think it’s also been early days, in terms of [the deepfake] use case in India,” he tells Sky News.
“There have been other modes of content, for instance, doctored images, Photoshopped images that have been prevalent, particularly on WhatsApp groups, for much longer in India.”
WhatsApp is, for many people in India, simply the internet. Platforms that dominate in other democracies remain niche. Take ad spending on Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram (and WhatsApp, although it doesn’t show ads).
The ruling BJP is clearly dominating, according to the data provided by Who Targets Me. But compare that to US spending.
The US isn’t even holding an election – at least not yet – and it is comfortably outspending India.
And Pal argues that other platforms have now caught up with WhatsApp.
“WhatsApp groups were the big player in the fairly recent elections as well,” he says. “YouTube is either at par or more important than WhatsApp right now.”
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
The most novel digital development of this election, he argues, is the emergence of YouTube influencers.
Earlier this month, for example, Curly Tales, a food blogger with more than three million followers, featured the chief minister of Maharashtra on her channel. And politicians have been making concerted attempts to woo influencers across the board.
AP file pic
“The most surprising thing about the campaign has been the emergence of digital influencers over professional journalists as the interviewers in the campaigns themselves,” Pal says.
“As opposed to a professional journalist who might be fairly educated about policy and can ask a politician aggressive questions about what is or is not working about their platform, a digital influencer doesn’t have that ability.”
For all the innovation, deepfakes and influencers do perhaps open up an information gap – one where doubt and misinformation can spread, inadvertently or not.
World
‘I wasn’t aware’: Far-right regional leader of Germany’s AfD in court for final day of Nazi slogan trial
One of Germany’s most prominent far right politicians is expected to hear if he has been found guilty of using a banned Nazi slogan.
Björn Höcke, one of the leading figures of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, is due in court in Halle for the final day of his trial.
He is charged with knowingly using a Nazi slogan at a rally in 2021, an act which is forbidden under German law.
The trial heard Höcke used the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany) at the AfD event in May 2021.
The phrase is associated with the SA or Storm Troopers, the paramilitary wing of the National Socialist party also known as the Brownshirts.
They played a significant role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Prosecutors claim he knew the phrase was banned but he told the court he is “completely innocent”.
The 52-year-old has led the AfD’s regional branch in Thuringia since 2013, the year the party was founded, and is due to lead its campaign in a state election set for 1 September.
It is one of three branches that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has under official surveillance as a “proven right-wing extremist” group.
At their recent annual general meeting, Höcke told Sky News he believed the legal case was politically motivated.
“I’m seeing something similar in the USA. Donald Trump is also on trial there and he too is being slowed down. He is hampered in all his development opportunities. I think that’s the point. So for me, the whole thing is a political conspiracy,” he said.
“But as a former history teacher were you not aware of the Nazi links?” I asked.
“No, I wasn’t aware. It’s a commonplace saying which unfortunately was once burned by the Nazis,” he replied.
He once called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” and called for Germany to perform a “180-degree turn” in how it remembers its past.
A party tribunal in 2018 rejected a bid to have him expelled.
Anti-AfD protestors have been gathering outside the court during the trial.
“Together against fascism,” they shouted as the hearings took place.
“We must not tolerate slogans that we know are leading us in the wrong direction historically,” Lennard Giessenberg told reporters.
“I hope he gets the maximum penalty and that a sign will be sent,” added Sven.
This case is among a string of controversies facing the AfD.
Earlier this year there were mass protests across Germany after a leaked report revealed some members attended a meeting where the mass deportation of migrants was discussed.
Last month, an AfD aide was accused of spying for China.
Despite this, the party is still second in the polls and many back Höcke.
“Björn Höcke is one of the best and most sincere patriots and politicians we have in this party,” said Eric Engelhardt, a member AfD’s youth wing in Thuringia.
He believes Höcke is exactly what Germany needs.
While a guilty verdict could in theory mean a prison sentence, a fine is a more likely punishment.
The outcome of the trial is unlikely to impact Höcke’s support among the hardcore which seemingly remains undented.
On Monday, a German high court ruled domestic security services could continue to treat the AfD as a potentially extremist party, meaning they retain the right to keep it under surveillance.
The party said it would appeal.
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