Johnson leaving in disgrace - Chris Bryant
Labour MP Chris Bryant, the chair of the Commons standards committee, has been on BBC Breakfast this morning.
He says that Johnson has been forced out by a report from a committee that had a Tory majority, and during a period where the Commons also has a Tory majority, shows he is leaving as a “disgraced” former prime minister.
In all the breathlessness of this it’s easy to forget quite how significant a moment this is.
I presume he’s resigned because he, being the only person who has seen the draft copy of the report from the privileges committee, knows that the house is going to decide that he has lied to parliament and that that is a serious contempt of parliament, therefore he should be suspended from the house.
That has never ever happened to a prime minister. So he was not only ousted as prime minister but then thrown out of the House of Commons… by a committee that had a conservative majority and by a house that has a significant majority.
So he is leaving as a disgraced prime minister.
A yank's rose-tinted perspective... — Changeling
Is there a vice-Prime-Minister? — frank
Privileges committee.The question which the house asked the committee is whether the house had been misled by Mr Johnson and, if so, whether that conduct amounted to contempt. It is for the house to decide whether it agrees with the committee. The house as a whole makes that decision. Motions arising from reports from this committee are debatable and amendable. The committee had provisionally concluded that Mr Johnson deliberately misled the house and should be sanctioned for it by being suspended for a period that would trigger the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act 2015. In light of Mr Johnson’s conduct in committing a further contempt on 9 June 2023, the committee now considers that if Mr Johnson were still a member he should be suspended from the service of the House for 90 days for repeated contempts and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process, by:
a) Deliberately misleading the house.
b) Deliberately misleading the committee.
c) Breaching confidence.
d) Impugning the committee and thereby undermining the democratic process of the house.
e) Being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee.
We recommend that he should not be entitled to a former member’s pass.
London: Former British prime minister Boris Johnson was turned away from a polling station when trying to cast his vote in the local elections after he forgot to bring acceptable photo ID.
Johnson, who introduced the contentious new laws mandating photo ID when voting while he was in Downing Street, was reportedly trying to cast his ballot in South Oxfordshire, where a police and crime commissioner for the Thames Valley was being selected.
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