The police have today concluded that the PM, the Chancellor and the PM’s wife all attended illegal parties, that breached Covid laws written by the PM. This is most serious for Boris Johnson of the three of them, because it was he who told MPs on 8 December…
that he had been “repeatedly assured” there were no parties and that no Covid rules were broken. He now has the challenge of his life to prove that he did not wilfully and knowingly mislead MPs - because if he did deliberately mislead MPs then he has no choice but to…
resign under the code of conduct for ministers, which he signed off and approved in keeping with normal practice on becoming prime minister. This is perhaps the most important test of the robustness and efficacy of the checks and balances in the British constitution of my…
lifetime. If Tory MPs unthinkingly keep him in office without a proper and public assessment of how parliament was misled, because that is what suits them, and if they blithely ignore the Ministerial Code, then the charge will stick that this or any…
party with a big majority is simply an elected dictatorship, and the constitution means little or nothing. This is not just a slippery slope. It is the bottom of the slope.
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The PM says of that 19 June indoor birthday party with cake, for which he has been fined, that “I have to say in all frankness at that time it did not occur to me that this might have been a breach of the rules." Ignorance of the rules is rarely a defence in law, as you…
know. And it is usually not a defence in the court of public opinion if the broken rules were written by the transgressor. But even for those who give the PM the benefit of the doubt, there is a looming problem. Which is…
whether Boris Johnson can deliver the same excuse, with the same degree of sincerity and credibility, if the police issue him with yet more fines for attending other lawbreaking parties. And according to a source who knows a thing or two about the…
On 1 December Boris Johnson told Sir Keir Starmer in the Commons: "I have been repeatedly assured that the rules were not broken. I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no COVID rules were broken." The…
20 Met fines prove the PM misled MPs by saying that. If he did not knowingly mislead, and therefore did not commit a resigning offence, he has to concede he presided over a culture of dishonesty or incompetence in 10 Downing St, and that his officials misled him. Which…
in itself would be very serious and presumably requires investigation. See my blog on all this itv.com/news/2022-03-2…
Small sidebar on @Gabriel_Pogrund’s compelling tale of how Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev - ennobled by Boris Johnson against the initial advice of the security services - insisted on attending a lunch with then Mi6 boss John Sawers 8 years ago, but was told by Mi6 he was not…
welcome. 1) the lunch invitation from Sawers was to Chris Blackhurst, then editor of the Independent, also owned by Lebedev and his ex KGB dad Alexander. To this day Blackhurst has no idea how Lebedev found out about the lunch invitation in the first place. 2) Lebedev…
was so insistent on attending, and would not take no for an answer, that an exasperated secret service eventually rang Blackhurst and dictated a “Yes Minister” style statement to him - opaque but unambiguous - for conveying to Lebedev on why it would not be appropriate for…
Boris Johnson has just told Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he should soon see his wish granted that Russian banks are kicked out of SWIFT, the messaging service that underpins international bank transfers. In a telephone call, Zelenskyy said to Johnson, "you...
know your Shakespeare, so the question is 'to SWIFT or not to SWIFT'". Johnson replied that those holding out on the expulsion of Russia from the SWIFT system were "increasingly isolated" He said "I think we'll get there. Earlier today, Italy's prime minister Mario Draghi...
reversed his opposition to what would be a significant ratcheting up of financial sanctions, but the US president and German Chancellor are still reluctant. Johnson also told Zelenskyy that the UK would within hours start to send the arms and ammunition requested by Ukraine's...
If Russia is expelled from the SWIFT banking messaging system, that would be serious economic warfare against Putin. Because Thursday’s decision by the US Treasury to make it almost impossible for Russia’s two biggest banks, VTB and Sperbank, to do any business with US…
institutions or use US infrastructure to process dollar payments will potentially disrupt ten of billions of dollars of Russian financial transactions every day, much of it related to its huge oil and gas industry. This combined prohibition on international transfers by…
Russian banks and the US embargo on dollar clearing for them would in theory generate a massive negative economic shock for Russia, that… would rapidly impose serious hardship on Russian people. The big question of course is whether this would…
To keep us safe, and to keep the economy open, there has to be fairly extensive Covid testing, surveillance and genome sequencing regime. Without it, we wouldn’t know if a new and dangerous strain were here, till too late to contain it with antivirals and booster vaccines…
As i said earlier, this monitoring regime - plus the perceived imperative of maintaining adequate stocks of anti-virals - is pricey. Over the weekend the row between Dept of Health and the Treasury has not been about new money to pay for it, though it was before, but…
has been a dispute about whether this Covid insurance policy was necessary at all. The health sec Javid wanted it. Sunak was sceptical. In the end Javid won this argument, and will pay for it by cutting other programmes. One big question is what NHS spending will now…