Boris Johnson set to face House of Commons vote on partygate fine
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Boris Johnson is set to face a House of Commons vote over whether he misled parliament over the partygate scandal, after the Prime Minister received a police fine last week.
House of Commons speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle today granted a vote to opposition parties on Thursday to see if the Prime Minister should be referred to the privilege committee.
Speaking in the Commons today, Hoyle said he received a letter from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer calling for a vote over the “matter of the Prime Minister’s statements to the house regarding gatherings at Downing street and Whitehall during the lockdown”.
Johnson told parliament on numerous occasions in December and January that no Covid rules were broken in Downing Street throughout the pandemic, however the PM’s police fine last week suggests this is not true.
It is traditionally a resigning offence for a minister or Prime Minister to mislead parliament.
Hoyle said Starmer would be allowed to table a “motion of debate” on Thursday.
“I want to be clear about my role – firstly, as members will appreciate, it is not for me to police the ministerial code. I have no jurisdiction over the ministerial code, even though a lot of people seem to think I have,” Hoyle said.
“It is not for me to determine whether or not the Prime Minister has committed a contempt [of parliament]. My role is to decide whether there is an arguable case to be examined.”
Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis today told Times Radio that the PM had not misled parliament.
“His understanding was because of the workplace situation that the rules had not been broken,” he said.
“That was his understanding – they hadn’t been broken because of the exceptions to the workplace and he was in a workplace.
“In the sense that he has paid a fine that the police have decided to issue because the rules were broken. But that doesn’t mean that anything he said to parliament was inaccurate at the time. What he said to parliament he believed to be true at the time.”