and privileges, and it must protect Members of the House doing that duty from formal or informal attack or undermining designed to deter and prevent them from doing that duty. We will be making a Special Report separately to the House dealing with these matters.
15. We note that Mr Johnson at no point denounced this campaign while it was under way. Giving oral evidence, he expressed respect for the Committee and said, when pressed to do so, that he deprecated terms such as “witch hunt” and “kangaroo court”, but said “the people will judge for themselves” whether the Committee had been fair. Asked in relation to the Committee’s inquiry, “you would not characterise it as a witch hunt or a kangaroo court?”, he replied “I will wait to see how you proceed with the evidence that you have”. Despite a later communication expressing confidence in the Committee (see paragraph 223 below), he intimated that he would only accept the Committee’s conclusions if they were favourable to him, which indeed is demonstrated by his abusive reaction to our warning letter, which we discuss further below.[1]
16. Finally, we note that our inquiry, as mandated by the House, has been solely into the conduct of Mr Johnson. We have not investigated, nor in this report do we comment on, the conduct of any other individuals. This report must not be treated as being critical of anyone other than the subject of the inquiry.
The evidence in this inquiry
17. In our inquiry we examined what Mr Johnson said to the House about gatherings in No. 10 and whether what he said to the House was correct or not. If a statement was misleading, we considered whether it was a genuine error, was reckless, or was intentional, and whether the record was corrected comprehensively and in good time. We considered evidence supplied by the Government, including emails, WhatsApp messages and photographs. We received a limited number of WhatsApp messages from Mr Johnson.[2] We took written evidence, submitted with statements of truth, from witnesses present at the relevant times, to inform us of what Mr Johnson would have known at the time of his statements to the House. We relied only on first-hand evidence and not on hearsay or evidence repeated by others. We paid a visit to No. 10 to inspect for ourselves the locations of the various gatherings to which Mr Johnson referred in the House.
18. As set out in Chapters 2 and 3 of this report, on the basis of information that is in the public domain and evidence that the Committee has obtained, and in the context of what Mr Johnson has said to the House of Commons, we established:
- What Rules and Guidance relating to Covid were in force at the relevant time (see Chapter 2);
- Mr Johnson’s knowledge of those Rules and Guidance (see Chapter 2);
- Mr Johnson’s attendance at, or knowledge of, gatherings that breached the Rules or Guidance (see Chapter 2);
- ↑ Oral evidence: Matter referred on 21 April 2022: Conduct of Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP, HC 564, taken on 22 March 2023, Qq141–45
- ↑ We note that Mr Johnson has recently undertaken to supply the Covid public inquiry with a large number of his personal WhatsApp messages. This contrasts with his highly restrictive release of such messages to us. If it transpires from examination of the WhatsApp messages supplied to the Covid inquiry that there was relevant material which should have been disclosed to us either by Mr Johnson or the Cabinet Office, this would be a serious matter which the House might need to revisit.
