Privilege: Conduct of Right Hon. Boris Johnson

Bob Seely Excerpts

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I must agree; it seems to me that this is a Prime Minister whose judgment is so poor that he cannot even find it in himself to give an opinion on the Committee’s conclusions.

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I want to make a brief point. I am voting in support of the motion and I did not vote in support of Owen Paterson, but I remind the hon. Member that we got rid of Boris Johnson a year ago because we lost faith in him, because he was probably not telling the truth. I am also an Iraq war veteran, and the reality is that when Tony Blair lied and lied and lied, you lot covered up for him.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, but I must remind him that it was only last Friday that the current Prime Minister was too weak to stand up to the former Prime Minister and put a pause, at least, on his dishonourable honours list.

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[Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

We have been reminded in this debate that the report makes the fundamental point that:

“Our democracy depends on MPs being able to trust that what Ministers tell them in the House of Commons is the truth.”

On 24 November 2021, at Prime Minister’s questions, the then Prime Minister said that

“now, almost a month after furlough ended, there are more people in work than there were before the pandemic began.”—[Official Report, 24 November 2021; Vol. 704, c. 344.]

That statement was untrue. The monthly employment statistics at that time showed that there were over half a million fewer people in employment than there were before the pandemic began, and total employment remained lower than before the pandemic until this month’s employment statistics.

The former Prime Minister made the same untrue claim on 15 December 2021, then again on 5 January 2022 —when he said it three times—and then on 12 January and 19 January 2022. On 1 February 2022, the director general for regulation at the Office for Statistics Regulation wrote to the director of data science at 10 Downing Street to point out that that repeated claim was untrue. The Prime Minister repeated the claim again on 2 February, and again on 23 February 2022. I thought at first that the Prime Minister might have just misunderstood the numbers. It was true, as he claimed on a number of occasions, that the number of people on payrolls was higher than before the pandemic, but that was because a lot of self-employed people gave up self-employment during the pandemic or afterwards and became employees on payrolls instead.

The letter from the director general having had no impact, the then chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir David Norgrove, wrote to the Prime Minister on 24 February 2022:

“Dear Prime Minister…it is wrong to claim that there are now more people in work than before the pandemic began: the increase in the number of people who are on payrolls is more than offset by the reduction in the number of people who are self-employed.”

At the Liaison Committee in March 2022, I asked the then Prime Minister whether he accepted that correction in Sir David Norgrove’s letter. His reply was not straightforward, but the transcript of the meeting shows that Mr Johnson understood fully and clearly what had happened in the labour market—he did not misunderstand the figures—and he also accepted that employment was in fact lower than before the pandemic. He said that he was going to correct the record on that point, which he did not do, but he did recognise that his claim had been mistaken.

Despite that, Mr Johnson subsequently carried on making the claim. He said it again the next month, on 20 April and on 27 April. In his final Question Time as Prime Minister on 20 July last year, he said, despite knowing well that it was untrue,

“We have more people in paid employment than at any time in the history of this country.”—[Official Report, 20 July 2022; Vol. 718, c. 951.]

My conclusion from all of this, which I think sheds some light on the events covered by the report, is that Mr Johnson just is not interested in whether a statement is true or not. He is a clever man—he thinks quite hard about what he plans to say—but the criterion, “Is this true?” is not an important consideration for him.

[Bob Seely]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a good speech. Boris had a complicated relationship with the truth—I am not denying that. The right hon. Gentleman has been in this House for a very long time, and it is great that he is saying that truth and integrity are very important. New Labour had a reputation for injecting lies into the British political process as never before. [Interruption.] It is true, actually. Did he specifically object to the lies that were told in the run-up to the Gulf war? He was in Parliament then.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I was in Parliament, and I do not believe that Ministers at that time said things that they knew to be untrue. I think it is absolutely clear, as far as I can tell—I am just spelling out the facts—that the former Prime Minister did say in this House things that he knew well to be untrue, because I had the chance to discuss them with him at the Liaison Committee and he agreed they were untrue, but he carried on saying them.

[Bob Seely]

So when Ministers were sexing up documents about weapons of mass destruction, they believed those claims to be true.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

Yes, I do believe that those who made those points in the House at the time believed that they were true. It subsequently became clear that they were not. I defy anyone to claim the same about Boris Johnson, given the particular history that I have recounted. As we have been reminded in this debate, that approach to politics is toxic for democracy. What is the point of us standing up and asking Ministers questions day after day if they routinely give us answers they know to be untrue? We have no chance of building confidence in Parliament, in democracy and in politics if Ministers do not care whether what they say is true or not.

Maybe there is a contrary argument that great men should not have to worry about such trivial details, but the Committee is absolutely right: if that view prevailed, our democracy would be at very serious risk, as I think it is across the Atlantic at the moment. With Boris Johnson having made a pretty successful career out of not telling the truth, thank goodness that the Committee was willing to take a stand. It is absolutely right, and I hope the whole House will support the Committee this evening.

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

First, I accept the Privileges Committee report, and I thank the Chair of that Committee and everyone who worked on it. Trust and integrity are important in politics. People think that politicians sometimes lack that, and when there is a chance to show that we are doing the right thing, it is important that that happens. As such, I will vote for the report and I accept the substance of it, while respecting some of the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg) and my hon. Friends the Members for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) and for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici). Although I think they have a case, I am afraid that it does not quite convince me.

More broadly, I am so over Boris, and I am pretty over lockdown as well. The point I want to make tonight is that we are sometimes in danger of making Westminster look small and petty. Do not get me wrong: truth, and politicians at the Dispatch Box telling the truth, is a fundamental building block—a keystone—of this place. However, I can tell the House that, going by my inbox, for every person in this Chamber or every person watching who says, “Fantastic, you’re getting Boris,” or, “The Privileges Committee is doing its job,” there are other people saying, “Yet again, you are talking about yourselves. Yet again, it is politicians talking about process.” There were other big scandals to do with lockdown that arguably had more impact on our nation. That is not to deny the importance of Boris’s casual attitude to the truth. He saw lockdowns as being difficult to obey and, frankly, he was right. At that point, a wiser leader would probably have questioned his own rules, not sought to get around them—after all, they were his rules, and while one can love Boris, I think it is true to say that remorse is probably not one of his fine qualities.

For me, the scandal of lockdown and how we dealt with covid is not only whether there were wine Fridays and cake in Downing Street, and people carrying about pints of milk in protest; it is whether lockdown worked and the cost of lockdown in terms of lives, learning, sanity, money and truth. Since lockdown, we have had extraordinarily little conversation about those critical issues, but give people a chance to give Boris a kicking and we are queuing up to do so. I am just going to mention some of the other things that I think are important.

[Sir John Hayes]

Before my hon. Friend moves on to those other things, I want to reinforce the point he has made about calumnies in this House. By far the greatest deception I have seen in this House was when Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, came before us and said that he had secret information that our country was at risk from weapons of mass destruction. Whether he was knowing or whether he was simply careless, the consequences were bloody, and we are now introspectively discussing cake and sandwiches. That is how the public see it, and my hon. Friend is right about them regarding us as both introspective and self-indulgent.

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[Bob Seely]

For me, if it is cake versus the lives of 179 soldiers, it is pretty easy to say which I think is more important, but that does not excuse misleading the House.

I will briefly run through the other scandals, which are really important. We are now paying in excess deaths, as our constituents die of the cancers and heart diseases that went undetected when we in effect shut down the NHS for covid, exactly as doctors, experts, scientists and professors such as Karol Sikora warned. They paid a high price for it in the attacks on their integrity or on why the media should be carrying their comments. Given these excess deaths, it is not impossible that lockdown may end up killing more people, and certainly taking more life years, than it saved. One report recently—it is only one report, but there is a plethora of peer-reviewed reports, and one does try to follow some of them—suggested that lockdown may have saved 1,700 lives. That is the equivalent of the UK’s natural deaths in about 26 and a half hours. That was at the cost of shutting down our schools, the £400 billion and so on.

To come on to the next scandal, our schools were shut. That is a disaster that has stalled educational improvement, and 100,000 kids—ghost kids—have disappeared off the rolls. What has happened to those kids—drifting into abuse, mental health crises, drugs, crime, solitude and loneliness? We do not know. It is one of the great scandals of the day. [Interruption.] The shadow Leader of the House is shaking her head, and saying, “What’s that got to do with this?” The point I am trying to make, and I will take an intervention if she wants, is that there are important scandals to do with lockdown. I do not defend Boris—

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for inviting me to intervene. I just want to clarify that this debate is about the Privileges Committee report into whether or not Boris Johnson knowingly misled the House. It is not about whether the lockdown rules were good or bad. That may be a debate worthy of parliamentary time, but it is not this debate.

[Bob Seely]

It is a debate worthy of parliamentary time, but when I held a debate on the use of Imperial modelling, not a single Labour Member turned up apart from the shadow Minister. The point I am trying to make is that there were scandals and other important things about lockdown. One of the things we are criticised for, as the shadow Leader of the House will know, is having an obsession with ourselves when there are other great and important things to be discussed about covid and lockdown, not only whether Downing Street had—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. We have to remember what we are discussing today, without going too wide, because there are 14 other Members who want to contribute to the debate, and I think they want to talk about what is in the report.

[Bob Seely]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I will wind up if you think I am speaking out of turn or too widely. However, I was going to say that our mental health crisis is a scandal worth reporting. The fact is that this cost £400 billion, and the fact is that science was misused and trust abused. Lockdown was an experiment, and I do sometimes think that focusing the lockdown debate on the behaviour of the then Prime Minister is too narrow and does not do this House a service.

I will vote to support the Privileges Committee report, but I do wish that the same level of interest, especially from the Opposition, would sometimes focus on the stuff that actually made a difference in lockdown, not just on vindictively going after Boris Johnson.