LONDON: Former British prime minister Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over Covid-19 lockdown parties, a parliamentary committee said in a damning report on Thursday.
The privileges committee — the main disciplinary body for lawmakers — published its conclusions after investigating whether Johnson had wilfully misled parliament about lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street during the Covid-19 pandemic.
"We conclude that in deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt," the report said.
Johnson, one of Britain's most well-known and divisive politicians, said it was a lie to say he deliberately misled parliament and called the report a charade. He resigned from parliament last week after seeing an advance copy of the report.
The Committee found that Johnson sought to undermine the parliamentary process by deliberately misleading the House of Commons and the Committee, by breaching confidence, impugning the Committee and by being complicit in a campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation.
It said that were Johnson still a member of parliament, he should have been suspended from the House for 90 days. "We recommend that he should not be entitled to a former Member’s pass," it added.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson on Thursday dismissed a parliamentary report into whether he deliberately misled the House of Commons as a "charade".
"This report is a charade," he said in a statement published at the same time as the report.
"The committee now says that I deliberately misled the House, and at the moment I spoke I was consciously concealing from the House my knowledge of illicit events. "This is rubbish. It is a lie." — Reuters
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