We’re well used to the football referee dipping into his pocket to brandish a red card at a player or manager who has questioned his eyesight or his understanding of the offside rule. The ref’s word is final, and the original offence immaterial. We understand that the game is ungovernable unless the implicit contract between players and administrators is enforced.
So it is in politics. When, in the wake of a booking by the Commons privileges committee for lying to parliament, Boris Johnson then impugned the character and motives of the Tory-majority committee his government established, describing it as a “kangaroo court” making “Mystic Meg” claims and reaching “deranged conclusions”, attacking chair Harriet Harman’s partiality and Tory member Bernard Jenkins’s “rank hypocrisy”, it is hardly surprising the committee reacted.
Conservative Party supporters of the former prime minister have complained about the “vindictiveness” of the committee’s actions in substantially hiking its suggested penalty to a 90-day suspension following Johnson’s tirade. MPs are free to criticise the findings of committees, including disciplinary committees. But what is problematic is to impute bad faith.
Johnson certainly did so. “I was wrong to believe in the committee or its good faith,” he wrote after it published its report, admitting that he holds it in contempt. “For the privileges committee to use its prerogatives in this anti-democratic way, to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination – that is beneath contempt.”
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Johnson’s resignation from the House of Commons has made the recommendation moot, but it will be important that British MPs reaffirm it when they vote on the committee’s findings today. To do otherwise would be to allow Johnson to undermine a vital pillar of the house’s ability to manage its own affairs. By lying to it and to the committee, Johnson has already done more than enough damage. The red card should stand.