It is believed by Sunak’s allies that Johnson simply wanted to cause the PM a headache. While Johnson has ostensibly resigned over the committee’s report, it was expected that Johnson might resign after Sunak rejected certain people that Johnson wanted to elevate to the UK’s upper parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords. He still protests his innocence and has called the committee “beneath contempt”. Having seen the report ahead of its publication, Johnson resigned as a member of parliament and continued to accuse the committee of being politically motivated. The committee disagreed, this week recommending that Johnson should be suspended from parliament for 90 days and not be allowed a pass back into the building, something ex-members are entitled to. Even after it become transparent that this wasn’t true, Johnson maintained that he did not knowingly mislead parliament. Johnson had initially told parliament that all rules were followed at all times. Sunak was also fined for the same incident. This is the committee’s investigation into the infamous Partygate scandal, which led to Johnson being fined by police for breaking Covid rules. The second, and probably more explosive, of the spats distracting from the inquiry revolves around a parliamentary committee specifically looking at whether or not Johnson knowingly misled lawmakers when he said that during the pandemic, all of the rules in place were observed at all times. Johnson undercut Sunak by directly handing his own information to the inquiry.ĭeborah Doyle, spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said of the government’s legal action: “For the Cabinet Office to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on suing its own public inquiry into being unable to access critical evidence is absolutely obscene … They’re displaying exactly the same contempt for ordinary people that was so disastrous when the pandemic struck in the first place.”īoris Johnson and Rishi Sunak led Britain through much of the pandemic. The government says it wants to block this because it could set a precedent where information that isn’t relevant could enter the public domain which could have an adverse affect on the way that people making decisions communicate during a crisis. That means anything form private WhatsApp messages to private diaries. Sunak and his government is legally challenging the inquiry’s right to request personal information from people who were directly involved in decision-making during the pandemic. The first such spat relates directly to the inquiry. The inquiry, which began taking evidence on Tuesday, had for weeks been overshadowed by a series of spats between Sunak, the current prime minister, and Johnson, who resigned in disgrace last summer. It’s instead become a political circus that could hurt both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Britain’s Covid inquiry was supposed to give closure to people who lost loved ones in the pandemic.
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