'Mr Johnson will now face a grilling on March 20'

MP for Ellesmere Port

BORIS Johnson comes from a journalistic background and spent many years earning large sums as a national newspaper columnist before becoming a politician.

He went onto rise to the greatest of UK political heights before falling in Humpty Dumpty style from the top of the Parliamentary hill.The trouble is that Boris Johnson is never far from being the story himself and it is very difficult to get past the Partygate era for a number of reasons. It was always the case that there would be more Partygate business to follow long after Boris Johnson was removed as Prime Minister after he finally fell out of favour with Conservative MP colleagues. The reason for this is that members of the Commons Committee of Privileges made it clear long ago that they would be investigating the ex-PM’s conduct during the COVID-19 years. They have a remit to look at issues such as contempt of Parliament and have now issued an interim report detailing ways in which Boris Johnson may have misled the House about his knowledge of and involvement in lockdown gatherings, bearing in mind that both he and new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak accepted fixed penalty notices from the Metropolitan Police for attending a lockdown party in and around No 10 Downing Street.

Mr Johnson will now face a grilling on March 20 now that he has accepted the Conservative-dominated committee’s invitation to give oral evidence in public but he has already made it clear that he believes he has no case to answer. He also believes he has been thrown a political lifeline now that it has emerged that civil servant Sue Gray – the woman appointed by Boris Johnson to run the Partygate inquiry which ultimately led to his demise – has accepted a job as Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Boris Johnson has been protesting that he is the victim of the “greatest stitch-up since the Bayeux tapestry” following the decision of Sue Gray to take up a job with the official Opposition.The problem with his approach is that he accepted the entirety of Sue Gray’s Partygate inquiry findings. Indeed,he appointed her to do the inquiry in the first place and I am sure he wouldn’t have done that had he questions about her impartiality.

Keir Starmer has said there is “nothing improper at all” about appointing Sue Gray to a top job in the Labour Party and says she will have to comply with long-established rules when someone in high office leaves the Civil Service. She is stepping down at the Cabinet Office’s Second Permanent Secretary but it will be quite some so-called ‘garden leave’ time before she can actually start to work for the Labour Party’s hierarchy.Parliamentary insiders believe there is an element within the Conservative Party who are intent on removing Rishi Sunak at a suitably convenient moment with a view to Boris Johnson trying to claw back the Tories from defeat at the next election. They see any rubbishing of investigations into Boris Johnson’s conduct as being part of his rehabilitation, but lets us not forget so many Ministers resigned because they couldn’t support him as Prime Minister and most people who have seen the photos of the parties attended by Boris Johnson made up their mind a long time ago about his knowledge of them and involvement in them