Partygate inquiry unlikely to drive stake through the heart of Boris Johnson’s political career
Love him or hate him, everyone knows that Boris Johnson thrives on being the centre of attention.
Next Wednesday afternoon from 2pm the former prime minister will be back in the spotlight at Westminster for a high stakes appearance, which is bound to be a popcorn moment for spectators.
Live on television, members of the cross-party privileges committee will question Mr Johnson for up to four hours on whether he deliberately lied when he told the House of Commons that he had no knowledge of rule-breaking parties in Number 10 during the COVID emergency period.
If the MPs conclude that he is guilty, they will recommend punishment which could lead to him losing his parliamentary seat representing Uxbridge – a calamity which would surely end the political career of a man who would be prime minister again.
Technically the MPs have to decide whether Mr Johnson committed contempt of the House by lying to it about the parties, and not correcting his words subsequently.
It is a trial by his peers.
First, the seven MPs on the privileges committee. Then, if punishment is recommended, the whole House of Commons will say whether to implement it.
The committee’s work has already caused ructions at Westminster.
Chris Bryant, the senior Labour MP who chaired it, stood aside, or rather “recused” himself as the jargon has it, because of previous outspoken criticisms of Mr Johnson.
MPs were reluctant to let the ranking Tory, the maverick Brexiteer Sir Bernard Jenkin take over, so Harriet Harman, the former Labour deputy leader was co-opted to take the chair.
Meanwhile two Conservatives on the committee, first time MP Andy Carter and Alberto Costa, quit minor posts in government to keep their place on it. The other members are Allan Dorans (SNP), Yvonne Fovargue (Labour), and Sir Charles Walker (Conservative). Four Conservatives gives them the majority on the seven member committee.
Taxpayers are paying for Mr Johnson to hire his own lawyers on behalf of the government.
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Sky’s political correspondent Liz Bates explains everything you need to know about the partygate inquiry
Strong circumstantial case against Mr Johnson
David Pannick, an independent member of the House of Lords, duly produced opinions that the committee’s actions are “very unsatisfactory” and “fundamentally flawed”.
His main argument was that the crux should be not whether Mr Johnson misled the House but whether there was “intention to mislead”.
Lord Pannick KC’s other clients include Sir Philip Green, Shamima Begum and Manchester City FC.
MPs are lawmakers who regulate their own affairs and they set aside Lord Pannick’s argument.
Boris Johnson pictured toasting staff in Downing Street during lockdown
Boris Johnson at a gathering on 14 January 2021
Nonetheless, Mr Johnson’s intentions in making the statements he did will be flashpoints during his grilling next week.
There is a strong circumstantial case against Mr Johnson. He repeatedly denied any knowledge of parties and rule breaking during the COVID restriction periods in 2020 and 2021, even though he had announced many of the regulations himself.
He subsequently accepted a fixed penalty notice from the Metropolitan Police, and paid a fine for attending a party on his birthday.
Like the Sue Gray report into partygate before it, the pre-hearing interim report from the privileges committee this month cites “evidence that a culture of drinking in the workplace in some parts of No 10 continued after the COVID restrictions began” including “birthday parties and leaving parties for officials”.
The committee’s report contains photographs which show more booze and crowding than the pictures released by Ms Gray.
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Yet when Mr Johnson was questioned about the parties in the Commons after the stories broke in the media in the closing months of 2021 he repeatedly denied them.
On 1 December 2021 he told the House: “All guidance was followed completely in Number 10.”
On 8 December he stated: “The guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times… I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and no COVID rules were broken.”
Committee wants answers on four points
The committee’s interim report amounts to a rap sheet he will face.
The committee wants answers on four points.
Did Mr Johnson mislead, i.e. lie, when he said “No rules were broken” and that he had “no knowledge of gatherings”?
Was he truthful when he said he needed to rely on assurances of officials that no rules had been broken and that he needed to wait for Sue Gray’s report to find out whether rule-breaking parties had taken place?
The committee has taken written evidence from 23 people involved and has already concluded “breaches of [COVID] guidance would have been obvious to Mr Johnson at the time he was at the gatherings”.
Lying is a very delicate subject at Westminster. Many members of the public may think it is what politicians do all the time. But accusations of lying are officially designated “unparliamentary language”, and no MP is allowed to directly accuse another of doing so.
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The assumption is that no “honourable or right honourable” member would lie and that if they inadvertently tell a falsehood, they will correct the official record.
In recent times, government ministers have corrected their statements in Hansard more than one hundred times a year.
Former PM will be playing to the dwindling band of Boris-loyalist politicians
No one knows how tough the questioning will be on Wednesday or how Mr Johnson will react to it.
His lifelong tactic when in a tight spot is to flatter his audience and try to make a performative joke of it.
As his admiring father Stanley reminisced it worked in the school play at Eton: “Boris was playing the title role. It was fairly obvious that he hadn’t learnt the part, but he winged it splendidly, inventing on the hoof a sequence of nearly perfect Shakespearean pentameters.”
Mr Johnson’s appearances before more demanding audiences have gone less well.
Asked if he was a habitual liar, he could only bluster “I don’t agree with that conclusion”.
He was forced to stand down as prime minister last summer shortly after a member of the Liaison Committee of MPs told him bluntly “the game is up”.
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Boris Johnson faces a political battle over partygate as MPs said evidence suggests breaches over COVID rules would have been obvious to the then prime minister
Sir Max Hastings, who boosted Mr Johnson when he was working for him at The Daily Telegraph now abominates him.
He has remarked: “Those who know Boris best like him least.”
Mr Johnson has never been “a House of Commons man” but MPs cannot fail to know him well by now.
However he is treated by the committee, Mr Johnson will be playing to the dwindling band of Boris-loyalist politicians and party members and his champions in the Tory media, who are already claiming that he was brought down unjustly by a partisan left-wing conspiracy.
Unlike Mr Johnson, who catastrophically tried to use the whip on his MPs to save his friend Owen Patterson from a 30-day suspension for corruption, Rishi Sunak has said he will not interfere.
Mr Johnson’s fate may well hang on which way Conservative MPs jump, on the committee and afterwards in the whole House.
The psephologist Peter Kellner has a single word of advice for those Conservatives hankering to bring back Boris: “don’t” – in their own interest.
Inquiry unlikely drive the stake through the heart of Mr Johnson’s political career
Analysing an opinion poll by Delta, Mr Kellner points out that Mr Johnson is more unpopular with the public than either Mr Sunak or Sir Keir Starmer, and just as disliked as the lowly ranked Conservative Party, meaning he would bring no bounce with him.
All the same, the chances must be low that the lying inquiry will finally drive the stake through the heart of Mr Johnson’s political career via the Recall of MPs Act, which was introduced by David Cameron.
First the committee would have to recommend a suspension of more than 10 sitting days as punishment, then it would need to be endorsed by a majority in the House. Only then would a recall petition have to take place in his constituency. Next, 10% of the electorate in Uxbridge would have to sign it, to kick him out and force a by-election.
That sequence is a tall order.
The betting has to be that “the greased piglet”, as David Cameron called him, will slip past his political slaughtermen again and carry on drawing attention to himself.
Five days before he was killed by a falling aid package, father-of-two Uday al Qaraan called on world leaders to open Gaza’s borders to food – and criticised the use of airdrops.
“This isn’t aid delivery,” said the 32-year-old medic as a crowd of children rummaged through the remains of an airdrop behind him. “This is humiliation.”
Using footage from social media, satellite imagery, eyewitness testimony and flight tracking data, Sky News has examined the dangers posed by airdrops – and just how little difference they are making to Gaza’s hunger crisis.
A tangled parachute and a crowd in chaos
Based on six videos of the airdrop that killed Uday, we were able to locate the incident to a tent camp on the coast of central Gaza.
We determined that the drop occurred at approximately 11.50am on 4 August, based on metadata from these videos shared by three eyewitnesses.
Flight tracking data shows that only one aid plane, a UAE Armed Forces C-130 Hercules, was in the area at that time.
Footage from the ground shows 12 pallets falling from the plane. The four lowest parachutes soon become tangled, and begin to fall in pairs.
As a crowd surges towards the landing zone, a gunshot rings out. Nine more follow over a 90-second period.
Sakhr al Qaraan, an eyewitness and Uday’s neighbour, says that Uday was among those running after the first pallet to land.
“He didn’t see the other pallet it was tangled up with, and it fell on him moments later,” says Sakhr.
“People ran to collect the aid in cold blood, devoid of humanity, and he suffocated under that damned blanket – under the feet of people who had lost all humanity.”
The scene descended into chaos as Palestinians, some armed, tussled over the limited food available.
By the time Uday was pulled from the crowd and rushed to hospital, it was too late.
The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.
Medic and father-of-two Uday al Qaraan, 32, was killed on 4 August by an aid package dropped from a UAE Armed Forces plane.
Parachutes failed in half of airdrops analysed
This was not the first time that airdrops at this location had posed a threat to those on the ground.
The day before Uday was killed, the same plane had dropped aid over the site.
The footage below, shared by the UAE Armed Forces, shows the view from inside the plane. Just before the footage ends, it shows that one of the parachutes was broken.
Hisham al Armi recorded the scene from the ground. His video shows the broken parachute, as well as another that had failed completely.
Military planes dropped aid at the site on eight consecutive days between 30 July and 6 August. Sky News verified footage showing parachute failures during four of those eight airdrops.
Flight tracking data shows that almost all of the 67 aid flights over that period followed a similar route along the coast, which is densely packed with tent camps.
An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) official told Sky News that the airdrops are routed along the coast, because this is where much of Gaza’s population is now concentrated.
An IDF spokesperson added the Israeli military “takes all possible measures to mitigate the harm to uninvolved civilians”.
Hisham al Armi told Sky News he is grateful to the countries that donated the aid, but “the negatives outweigh the positives”.
“Fighting occurs when aid is dropped, and some people are killed … due to the crush and parachutes.”
Other dangers are also posed by the airdrops.
The footage below, taken on 29 July, shows Palestinians venturing into the sea in order to chase aid that had drifted over the water. The IDF has banned Palestinians from entering the sea.
One woman, a relative of Uday who witnessed his death, described the airdrops as the “airborne humiliation of the people”.
“There is not enough aid for them,” she said. “It creates problems among the people, and some are killed just to obtain a little aid. And most people don’t receive any aid, they remain hungry for days.”
Between 27 July and 1 August, Gaza received an estimated 1,505 tonnes of food aid per day via land routes – 533 tonnes short of what the UN’s food security agency says is needed to meet basic needs.
Based on flight tracking data, we estimated that airdrops added just 38 tonnes daily, 7% of the shortfall.
“The quantities involved are minuscule in terms of the scale of the need,” says Sam Rose, Gaza director of UNRWA, the UN agency previously responsible for distributing food in the territory.
UNRWA claims it has enough food stationed outside of Gaza to feed the population for three months, but that Israel has not allowed the agency to bring in any food since 2 March.
“We should be dealing with that rather than introducing something else which is costly, dangerous, undignified and somehow legitimises … the access regime by suggesting that we found a way round it through airdrops,” Rose says.
COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating aid deliveries, referred Sky News to a statement in which it said there is “no limit on the amount of aid” allowed into Gaza.
An IDF spokesperson also denied restricting aid, and said the Israeli military “will continue to work in order to improve the humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip, along with the international community”.
In his interview five days before he was killed, Uday al Qaraan appealed to world leaders to open Gaza’s borders.
“What would happen if they just let the aid in?” he asked. “If you can fly planes and drop aid from the sky then you can break the siege, you can open a land crossing.”
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
World
Trump vowed to end Ukraine war in first 24 hours of his presidency – nearly 200 days in, could he be close?
Seven hours is a long time in US politics.
At 10am, Donald Trump accused Russia of posing a threat to America’s national security.
By 5pm, Mr Trump said there was a “good prospect” of him meeting Vladimir Putin “soon”.
There had, he claimed, been “great progress” in talks between his special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian president.
It’s difficult to gauge the chances of a meeting between the two leaders without knowing what “great progress” means.
Is Russia “inclined” towards agreeing a ceasefire, as Ukraine’s president now claims?
Is Mr Putin prepared to meet with his Ukrainian foe, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too?
The very fact that we’re asking those questions suggests something shifted on a day when there was no expectation of a breakthrough.
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Mr Trump repeatedly vowed to end the war within 24 hours of becoming president.
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World
My experience interviewing Nicholas Rossi – the fugitive in Scotland now facing a rape trial in Utah
There was always a heavy hint of charade in the company of “Arthur Knight”.
It was hard to square the man presenting as a bumbling aristocrat in Glasgow’s west end with one of America’s most wanted. And yet, there were always clues.
Like his knowledge of Kay Burley. On the day I first arranged to interview him, he told me that TV was a mystery to him and that he never watched it.
Then he said he hoped he wouldn’t be nailed to the wall by Kay – our then Sky News colleague and presenter.
How did he know Kay if he knew nothing about television, I wondered.
He also asked how we would “chyron” him, an American term for an on-screen title that I was unfamiliar with (and I’m in the business).
Rossi and his wife
There was also the matter of the plasma TV screen on his front room wall – he knew TV, alright.
Such was the international interest in the story of “Arthur Knight” – real name Nicholas Rossi – there was no escaping the attention of TV and everyone else.
His was a tale lifted from the pages of a fictional thriller – a fugitive pursued halfway across the world and discovered only when he had the misfortune to catch COVID and leave his tattoos exposed on a hospital ward.
Medical staff at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital did the eyes-on execution of an international manhunt.
As careful as he was, Rossi left a digital footprint that US authorities followed to a flat in Glasgow.
When we first arrived, he had been arrested but was out on bail.
It was dark inside his flat, and there wasn’t much floor space.
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It made movement difficult for Rossi because he was in a wheelchair.
When physical movement demanded finesse, like in lifting him into a car, his wife Miranda manoeuvred him Sumo-wrestler style.
Quite the spectacle.
We sat down for a number of interviews with Rossi and his wife, Miranda. Always, he addressed my questions with the busy eyes of concentrated deceit.
Rossi and his wife
Once, he insisted on sitting with his back to a bookcase. It featured the tome Machiavelli, prominently in shot.
It made me wonder how much of him was enjoying this.
He was a performer, certainly, and I suppose he’d been thrust centre stage.
He claimed to be an Irish orphan, but he never did get the accent right.
It was like a comedy fake when he wrapped an Irish lilt around gravelly tones.
He would suddenly start to sound Irish when you reminded him that he was, eh, Irish.
Not that he had the paperwork to prove it.
There was no birth certificate, no ID for his parents, no idea of exactly where in Ireland he’d been born.
He was the boy from nowhere because he knew he had to be – give any journalist a place to go looking for confirmation and therein lies a trail to ruin.
So “Arthur” kept it vague – his freedom depended on it.
When he did commit to detail, he ran into difficulty.
He told me he’d been raised in homes run by the Christian Brothers in Ireland, and I asked him which ones, specifically.
His reply was: “St. Mary’s and Sacred Heart.”
A quick check with the Christian Brothers revealed they have no facility named Sacred Heart in Ireland, and anything called St Mary’s wasn’t residential.
Of course, it was never going to last for him.
The extradition court in Edinburgh had fingerprint and photographic evidence, and there was a tattoo match, too.
Next week sees the start of his latest trial.
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
He is accused of raping a woman to whom he had been engaged.
The allegations offer a duplication for Rossi’s crime modus operandi – isolating women, refusing to leave their company, and engaging in sexual assault.
“Evil,” is how he was described by Brian Coogan to me. Brian is a former state representative in Rhode Island who, at one stage, was on the verge of adopting the young Rossi.
He was warned off by the adoption judge, who refused to let it happen, having seen the file on the young man.
Violence in childhood duly extended into adulthood, and Rossi was convicted in 2008 after sexually assaulting Mary Grebinski on a college campus in Ohio.
A DNA sample from that attack is what linked Rossi to rape in Utah, and it’s what caused the long arm of the law to reach as far as Scotland.
The footnote to the story concerns Miranda, Rossi’s wife, whom he married in Bristol in 2020.
Rossi faked his death in 2020, and his “widow”, a woman by the name of Louise, ran around telling people he’d passed away.
Father Bernard Healey, of Our Lady of Mercy Parish Church in Rhode Island, took a call from an English woman – sounding like “Hyacinth Bouquet”.
She said Rossi had died and asked if he would hold a memorial mass.
The priest agreed, but when the invitations started going out on social media, he took a call from the police telling him to cancel the arrangements, as Rossi wasn’t dead – he’d faked it and was in hiding.
The voice that rang round reporting news of Nicholas’ demise was familiar to anyone who has heard his wife Miranda. The two voices sound identical, indeed.
How much was Miranda involved in the deceit? It remains an open question in a story about to enter a new chapter – this time, set in an Utah courtroom.
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