The cross-party committee "considers that if Mr Johnson were still a Member he should be suspended from the service of the House for 90 days for repeated contempts and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process, by:
a) Deliberately misleading the House
b) Deliberately misleading the Committee
c) Breaching confidence
d) Impugning the Committee and thereby undermining the democratic process of the House
e) Being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the Committee.
We recommend that he should not be entitled to a former Member’s pass."
These are utterly stunning charges for any MP, let alone a former PM. But let us not forget, contrary to what Johnson and his diminished band of loyal supporters suggest this is not from a 'kangaroo court' but from a group of MPs charged by parliament with investigating Johnson's behaviour. As such they are charges, MPs will vote on whether or not to accept the report on Monday 19 June.
If they do accept it, he can't be suspended since he's already jumped but it should mark the end of Johnson and Johnsonism as a serious force. I don't mean that his political career is over since he will continue to damage the Tory brand for years, perhaps decades, probably from inside one of the fringe right-wing parties set up by millionaires like Richard Tice.
I don't rule out the prospect of him returning as an MP, there is always a ready market for a disruptor like him but as a serious figure (which he never was anyway) the committee's report should be enough to finish him off.
He isn't going quietly, mainly because he's too stupid to see what a mess he's in. His statement in response is just another wild, flailing attack on the committee:
"It is now many months since people started to warn me about the intentions of the Privileges Committee. They told me that it was a kangaroo court. They told me that it was being driven relentlessly by the political agenda of Harriet Harman, and supplied with skewed legal advice – with the sole political objective of finding me guilty and expelling me from parliament.
"They also warned me that most members had already expressed prejudicial views – especially Harriet Harman – in a way that would not be tolerated in a normal legal process. Some alarmists even pointed out that the majority of the committee voted remain and they stressed that Bernard Jenkin’s personal antipathy to me was historic and well-known.
"To be frank, when I first heard these warnings, I was incredulous. When it was first proposed that there should be such an inquiry by this committee, I thought it was just some time-wasting procedural stunt by the Labour Party.
"I didn’t think for one minute that a committee of MPs could find against me on the facts, and I didn’t see how any reasonable person could fail to understand what had happened."
Inside his head, Johnson's entire life has been a fiction where he is never wrong, no matter what the offence, the nation is in desperate need of him and he alone should be the leader. He is actually a psychopath, a sociopath and a narcissist totally unfit to be a parish councillor.
His faults and there are many, were well known before he joined the Tory party, before he became an MP, before he was mayor of London and before the party chose him as the leader and prime minister.
The party has only itself to blame for planting the seeds of its own destruction. After, Johnson and Truss, It is going to be a hell of a job to restore confidence in the ability of the thousands of members to choose a leader with even a modicum of competence.
His resignation honours list is now coming under scrutiny and there are calls for Sunak to block it. Nigel Adams as we know is set to miss out on a peerage while Charlotte Owen, a virtually unknown 29-year-old special adviser becomes a Baroness. Nobody can figure out why. But listen to this from Tortoise Media and reported elsewhere too:
"Her [Owen's] LinkedIn profile states that she worked as a special adviser for the former prime minister from February 2021 until October 2022.
"However she is not named alongside others in Number 10 in the annual report on special advisers published in June 2021. She is named in the same report from a subsequent year as working half for the prime minister and half for then chief whip Chris Heaton-Harris.
Two former Number 10 insiders told Tortoise her public profile did not match up with reality.
"One said: 'It is not what she says on her LinkedIn. She never worked in the policy unit. She was promoted very heavily by Nigel Adams [the former minister who resigned as an MP last week]… but there were dozens of people more senior than her.'
"They added: 'It is completely staggering – her peerage is one of the most strange and hardest to explain because she was so extraordinarily junior.'
"A second source added: 'Charlotte’s peerage is just so absurd… She joined in March 2022, she never worked in the policy unit… at the very least there is an inconsistency in what she’s saying.'
"They added: 'She wasn’t even the most important person in the political office, that is the odd part'."
I wonder if Nigel Adams' wife Claire knows that Miss Owen "was promoted very heavily" by her husband or indeed why?
Just a thought. This story might have quite a bit more in it yet. We shall see.
