Michael Gove has said he disagrees with the parliamentary investigation that found Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over the Partygate scandal, and will abstain from voting on it in the Commons.
The UK levelling up secretary claimed the Commons privileges committee’s recommendation that Johnson should be suspended for 90 days over repeated contempts of parliament was “not merited”.
While Johnson cannot serve the penalty because he has quit parliament, the cross-party group of MPs chaired by Labour’s Harriet Harman has recommended that the former MP be banned from holding a pass to access parliament after a series of offences.
Gove refused to be drawn on whether he believed Rishi Sunak should back the report, saying it was a matter for each MP to decide for themselves. But he said it was not right to reduce the report to a “single badge to pin on Boris Johnson”, as there were “complexities” in it.
Speaking to BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show, he said: “I don’t agree with the conclusion, however, personally … the decision to impose a 90-day penalty is not merited by the evidence that the committee has put forward.”
The former Conservative minister Justine Greening is among a growing number of Tory MPs who plan to back the committee’s work. “It would be easier to persuade the public that we have moved on from it if MPs simply went into the House of Commons on Monday and supported the privileges committee report,” she told the BBC.
“People are in parliament to take votes and I think they should be decisive about supporting the privileges committee’s work. Essentially, it’s important to recognise that MPs, and especially prime ministers, cannot mislead parliament and be allowed to get away with that.”
The privileges committee found Johnson had “closed his mind to the truth” and would have faced a 90-day suspension from the Commons had he not quit in fury at its conclusions before the report was published.
“He deliberately misled the house … on an issue of the greatest importance to the house and to the public, and did so repeatedly,” the report said. It added that Johnson’s attempt to brand the committee a kangaroo court “amounts to an attack on our democratic institutions”.
The findings came in an excoriating 106-page report published on Thursday, which also confirmed that the government last month handed over evidence of a further 16 lockdown gatherings at No 10 and Chequers that were “potentially problematic”.
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If the report is not opposed then it could simply be nodded through the Commons, saving the prime minister from having to choose between backing it and infuriating Johnson or voting against the report and risking public anger.
Downing Street said on Friday that Sunak “hadn’t fully had time to consider the report”. “The prime minister takes these processes very seriously, which is why he intends to take the time to study the report closely,” a spokesperson added.
The sanctions proposed by the Conservative-majority committee are expected to pass regardless, with only a relatively small group of Johnson loyalists expected to oppose the report’s findings.
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