Harriet Harman has said the four Conservative MPs who ruled Boris Johnson misled the Commons carried out “heroic service” by withstanding intolerable pressure from other Tory backbenchers.
The Labour MP said her Tory colleagues on the Commons privileges committee suffered “real harassment” from Johnson’s supporters, who wanted to interfere with the inquiry into the former prime minister’s Partygate statements at Westminster.
In her first interview since the committee ruled in June that Johnson “deliberately” misled MPs, Harman said it was “very wrong” and “very galling” for any backbencher to attempt to discredit the investigation.
The committee inquiry had been set up and its rules agreed by the Commons, Harman said, while she had been unanimously appointed as its chair, after the original chair, the Labour MP Chris Bryant, recused himself since he had written tweets critical of Johnson’s behaviour.
“Those four Conservative members of the committee did a heroic service on behalf of the House of Commons because they were absolutely steadfast,” Harman told an Edinburgh fringe event with Iain Dale, the political commentator and broadcaster, on Monday.
“They were getting rained down with emails and everything with people saying, ‘You are a disgrace, get off the committee. You should not be doing this. This is a witch-hunt.’
“And they were being so pressurised from their own side that they were like, ‘This is the job that we have agreed to do for the House of Commons. For our democracy. We are going to look at the evidence without fear or favour. And we’re going to carry on doing it.’”
Harman, the MP for Camberwell and Peckham, is stepping down at the next election after more than 40 years in the Commons. She said the report’s findings, which led Johnson to quit as an MP before it was published, were an essential part of efforts to uphold public confidence in the Commons.
It was also essential to show ministers that lying to the Commons carried serious consequences. Any minister who thought they could mislead MPs was “in jeopardy now”, she said.
“To have a cross-party committee make a unanimous finding and put it to the house and it be unanimously accepted: that is quite something,” Harman told Dale. “And I do think that ministers in future will be more careful about telling the truth. Because it is absolutely clear that there is no impunity.
“The whole thing about misleading the house is not the technicality. [If] ministers don’t tell us the truth, the whole show is pointless. And, therefore, it’s not a technicality. It’s what our democracy is completely based on. So this was a very serious issue being done on behalf of the house.”
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