Privilege: Conduct of Right Hon. Boris Johnson
Debate between Nigel Evans and Andrew Bridgen(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Reclaim)
All that glitters is not gold. The Overton window is framed by a vignette of deceit, and right hon. and hon. Members seem intent on paying homage to it above all else. Some will say and some have said that Boris Johnson misled the Committee and misled Parliament, and others that the Committee set out to achieve its predetermined goal of finding him guilty on all charges. Many of the public hold both views at once, and they are not mutually exclusive, so this pantomime staggers on.
The reality is that Parliament and the public are about as far out of lockstep with each other as they have ever been. I am not sure that the public in the real world care too much about this any more. I think very few people out there in the real world trust Boris Johnson. Sadly, through the process we have seen and the collateral damage to the reputation of this House, I think the Privileges Committee itself has been damaged and may be damaged further by revelations.
The public concern is very much to say, “a plague on all your houses”. What has caused this loss of public confidence in the procedures of the House? Well, the evidence is damning: Boris Johnson and his Government used behavioural scientists and spin doctors to clinically instil unreasonable fear to scare the public into ceasing their normal lives under the guise of a biological threat so deadly that they dared not go outside to see another person.
We all remember the relentless, day in, day out, informing of the public by Ministers in No. 10 about death rates and horror stories. We remember the signs everywhere we looked, we remember the adverts on the television and we remember the supermarket car parks filled with masked citizens each forced to stand in their own car parking bay. The relentless messaging from No. 10 was, “Stand on the stickers, follow the signposts, wash your hands, don’t see your loved ones”. The Government decided it was their job to be that of a parent and they saw the country as a toddlers playgroup, turning our police into teaching assistants, au pairs and, dare I say it, nannies. On every single account, they robbed the public of their dignity. It was nothing short of unacceptable. Our ancestors would be rightly ashamed of the situation.
During that period, the public yet again showed that their natural inclination, as fellow Brits, was to good-natured compliance and community spirit. We saw some of the largest demonstrations of kindness I have ever seen and those demonstrations, under immense pressure, showed the real spirit of the British people. Their altruism held up a mirror to the true nature of the appalling behaviour at No. 10. Any contention the public had that, in No. 10, “They have the latest, most accurate scientific data in front of them, and therefore these measures were justified in the face of the extreme risk” now has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the truth. The fact is that the same people who took the unprecedented powers to suspend our freedoms knew that these measures were nothing short of political posturing. They knew they were pointless. If the risks were really what they said they were and the science of the effectiveness of the lockdowns was that demonstrable, surely they would have been the most strident adherers to the rules—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. Mr Bridgen, you heard what I said to Mr Seely. We are talking about the contents of the report and you are going way wider than that now.