Matter referred on 21 April 2022 (conduct of Rt Hon Boris Johnson): Final Report/Annex 3
Annex 3: Purported response of Mr Johnson to the Committee’s warning letter edit
Purported response of Mr Johnson to the Committee’s warning letter, received by the Committee 12 June 2023, with Committee comments
1. The Committee has provided me with a 36 page document entitled “Extract of Provisional Conclusions” (‘the document’). Despite the fact that they are said to be “provisional”, the Committee has declared that I cannot challenge any of its conclusions on the facts[1], nor comment on any matters in it with which I disagree[2]. In short, the process adopted by the Committee denies me any opportunity to challenge their findings and conclusions, no matter how wrong, selective, unreasonable, illogical or unsupported by evidence. This cannot possibly be fair.
Committee comment: As Mr Johnson and his lawyers well know, the warning letter procedure is an opportunity after the evidence has been considered to respond to the Committee’s provisional conclusions and recommendations. It is not an opportunity to rehearse the evidence that has been received or to rehearse Mr Johnson’s disagreement with that evidence. Mr Johnson has had repeated opportunities to set out his evidence about the facts and has availed himself of those opportunities, in particular in the submissions that he made after all written evidence was available and after he had been questioned in the oral hearing.
2. To illustrate the invidious and unjust position in which the Committee has placed me, I set out below a critique of just a few of the Committees’ findings. This is merely a handful of the errors and injustices with which the document is riddled.
Committee comment: Mr Johnson had the opportunity to comment on the whole of the document containing provisional conclusions and recommendations but he now chooses only to selectively criticise. To adopt this approach is to undermine the workings of the House because the House is entitled to know what his criticisms are before he discusses them in public, something he implies he is going to do at paragraph 13.
3. As a preliminary issue, I note that the Committee criticises me for “failing to make any use” of the evidence that I insisted it obtain after my oral evidence session. This criticism illustrates perfectly, as Lord Pannick KC and Jason Pobjoy have pointed out, the unfairness of the Committee being investigator, prosecutor and fact-finder. My complaint, as the Committee will know from the correspondence, was that the Committee said that it would disregard any evidence that was not accompanied by a statement of truth. This meant that, had my legal team not intervened, the Committee was intending to disregard a great deal of evidence that supported me which, for some reason, it had not chosen to obtain. I had already made use of much of that evidence in my Submissions, which I adopted under oath at the oral evidence session, before I understood that the Committee was planning to disregard it. I also made use of some of it in my Further Submission, although I did not repeat what was in my earlier Submissions as they were already before the Committee. The Committee’s fundamental error is that the responsibility to “make any use” of this evidence was not mine but its own. It is the Committee that must fairly and objectively make use of and have regard to all of the evidence, whether for or against the allegations against me. The document demonstrates that the Committee has failed in this duty. The fact that it lays responsibility for its partial selection of the evidence at my door shows just how profoundly it has fallen into error. Its stance might be justified as a prosecutor in an adversarial process where each party can call its own witnesses before an impartial tribunal. As I had feared, this is precisely how the Committee seems to have approached its task.
Committee comment: Mr Johnson and his lawyers are well aware that the Committee required all evidence to be accompanied by a statement of truth. Contrary to Mr Johnson’s bald assertion, it has considered all of that evidence whether it is supportive of or adverse to Mr Johnson. Mr Johnson had all of the materials available to the Committee and in time to identify any material that he wished to rely upon as evidence and seek statements of truth from those witnesses. He chose to wait until the last moment before the oral hearing to start discussions about the evidence upon which he wanted to rely. Mr Johnson unfairly complained in that hearing that evidence on which he wished to rely had not been pursued. In any event, he had the right to use all of the disclosed material, whether or not accompanied by a statement of truth, during the oral hearing. He was provided with those materials for that purpose. The Committee asked him to identify the evidence and pursued it for him. Once received with a statement of truth, Mr Johnson chose to place no reliance upon it. There is accordingly no truth in the assertion that the Committee planned to disregard anything that supported Mr Johnson.
My assurances to the House on 8 December 2021
4. The Committee accepts that what I actually said about the scope of the assurances I received was accurate: I had repeatedly been assured that the event on 18 December 2020 was within the Rules. My words were clear and explicit and had been prepared with input from multiple officials and advisers. I also explained under oath, if there was any possibility of confusion, what I meant by those words. Despite my words being accurate, clear, undisputed and confirmed under oath, the Committee nevertheless finds that I deliberately gave the House a “misleading impression” that I meant something entirely different. In other words, I am condemned not for what I actually said but for what the Committee has now decided that I meant
Committee comment: The Committee is entitled to come to a view about the credibility of what Mr Johnson said to the House and to the Committee. In so far as he asserts that there are ‘multiple officials and advisers’ who provided assurances or had input into his statements, Mr Johnson had the opportunity to identify them and did not do so despite indicating that he would. The Committee asked all of the witnesses who it believed had relevant information about Mr Johnson’s knowledge whether they themselves had given assurances to Mr Johnson and none of them other than Mr Doyle and Mr Slack stated that they had personally given such assurances.
5. Furthermore, the Committee finds that I intended my assurances to be “overarching and comprehensive”. Not only is this the opposite of what I said, it ignores completely the fact that, in the very next breath, I announced an independent investigation.
Committee comment: The Committee is entitled to consider what members of the House and the public would have understood Mr Johnson to have said and what he meant by those words. The Committee also concluded that using an announcement about an independent investigation was a deliberate avoidance of his own knowledge.
6. Finally, the Committee finds that I “scaled down” what I meant by “repeatedly” and that “the only assurances that can… be said to have been given with certainty” were those from Jack Doyle and James Slack. However, it is the Committee that has scaled down what I said to fit its own conclusion by ignoring the sworn evidence of Sarah Dines MP, Andrew Griffith MP and Jack Doyle, corroborating my own evidence under oath, that I received additional assurances in meetings. There is no explanation for why their evidence is disregarded. The Committee supports its position by selectively and misleadingly quoting from correspondence. In a letter of 27 March my lawyers wrote:
“…Mr Johnson thought of an official who was in the morning meetings referred to by Andrew Griffith MP and Sarah Dines MP in their evidence to the Committee. However, he did not say that he knew precisely who was in each meeting and who specifically gave him the assurances remembered by the MPs.
On reflection, Mr Johnson is still not sure of these matters and does not wish to speculate. The Committee has evidence from Jack Doyle, Andrew Griffith MP and Sarah Dines MP that Mr Johnson was provided with assurances about the event on 18 December 2020 by officials at these meetings. Therefore, irrespective of the identities of those officials, there can be no dispute that (i) assurances were received from Jack Doyle and James Slack; (ii) three witnesses have given evidence that Mr Johnson received assurances in at least one of the PMQ prep meetings; and (iii) Mr Johnson was given assurances by more than one person and on more than one occasion.
7. In its document, the Committee has quoted only the underlined passage and presented it as if it applied to whether I recalled being given assurances in meetings at all. This is grossly misleading. As the full quote makes clear, I was not sure about who gave me the assurances in the meetings, but that they were given was never in doubt. It assists the Committee in its ‘misleading impression’ argument to find that I only received assurances from two advisers, but that is a complete denial of the evidence. Committee comment: The Committee has not disregarded the evidence of Sarah Dines MP and Andrew Griffith MP. Their evidence is limited and without the particulars that Mr Johnson failed to provide is insufficient to counter the consistent evidence that no additional assurances were given by anyone. In any event in oral evidence when pressed about whether the Committee should pursue the evidence of Ms Dines and Mr Griffith, Mr Johnson himself said it was “probably totally irrelevant”.
Committee comment: Mr Johnson’s lawyer’s explanation was considered and is quoted in full in the report. Mr Johnson gave the clear impression in oral evidence that he knew who he wanted to identify and he then failed to identify that person. His explanation for that failure is unconvincing.
My personal knowledge that the Rules were broken
8. The Committee purports to rule, as a matter of law, that it could never be reasonably necessary for work to attend a gathering purely to raise staff morale, and that the duration for which I attended any event is irrelevant. Therefore, it concludes, I must have known the Rules were broken even if I was present at such gatherings only for a few minutes. This finding is fundamentally wrong in multiple ways. First, the Committee has no power to purport to make such a finding and there is no precedent or judgment in support of its position – it is purely the Committee’s own interpretation of the law. Second, that interpretation appears to be in direct contradiction to the one adopted by the Met Police, who didn’t fine me for my attendance at precisely the same events and who have explained to the Committee that the lawfulness of a gathering “may have changed throughout the duration of the gathering”. The Committee does not refer to or have any regard to the Met Police’s advice, which obviously is correct. Third, as I set out below, it was the understanding of numerous officials who gave evidence to the Committee that they thought they were following the Rules. The Committee appears to have devised its legal test just for me.
Committee comment: The Committee does not interpret the law. It is, however, entitled to compare the plain language of the Rules and Guidance with what Mr Johnson said at the time when he was exhorting the public to follow those Rules and Guidance, and Mr Johnson’s attempts in evidence to re-interpret what the words meant.
9. Finally, the Committee’s reasoning ignores the actual question it must answer, which is whether I honestly believed that the Rules had been broken at the events I attended. The Committee can only find otherwise by unilaterally declaring my attendance as unlawful and then asserting that, uniquely amongst everyone at No10, I must have known that to be the case.
Committee comment: The Committee is entitled to conclude on all the evidence that Mr Johnson did not honestly believe what he said he believed or that he deliberately closed his mind to the obvious or to his own knowledge.
My personal knowledge of the event on 18 December 2020
10. The Committee’s findings about the event on 18 December 2020 appear to abandon completely any adherence to the ‘clear and cogent evidence’ test which it accepts it must adopt, and enters the realm of pure speculation. I gave evidence on oath that I was not aware of any event taking place and I did not recall seeing anything that appeared to me to be against the Rules when I went up to my flat at 21.58 that evening. Even if, despite my evidence to the contrary, the Committee found that I must have glanced up, there is no evidence whatsoever before the Committee about what was happening in the Press Office at that precise moment. There is, however, plenty of evidence before the Committee that the number of people present varied throughout the evening, that people came and went, and that many stayed at their desks to work. Despite this evidence, the Committee finds, based on its own site visit, that (i) I looked into the vestibule; and (ii) I saw a gathering in breach of the Rules. In support of this finding, the Committee refers to the facts that “drinking began at 5pm” and “continued till “the early hours”” and that the event was not work- related for “at least some of the time”. It is not explained how evidence of what was happening at completely different times has any bearing on what I would have seen had I glanced across at 21.58. Moreover, if the event was work-related for “some of the time” then there is no basis whatsoever for finding that I must have seen a rule-breaking gathering at that precise moment, let alone that I would have recognised it as such.
Committee comment: Mr Johnson ignores the plethora of evidence about how obvious it would have been to him at 9.58pm that something was happening that was in breach of the Rules and Guidance. The Committee concluded that it is likely that he knew about this particular gathering.
The argument from silence
11. The Committee fails completely to answer the point that, if it should have been obvious to me that these events were contrary to the Rules and guidance, then it should have been obvious to many others too. The Committee has not pointed to any evidence that anyone felt inhibited or scared to raise concerns either with me or with their superiors – this is pure speculation. The evidence cited in support of the Committee’s finding – that one official said they were “following a workplace culture… I did it because senior people did it” is evidence that they and the senior people referred to thought, as I did, that they were following the Rules. It contradicts rather than supports the Committee’s findings. More importantly, the Committee has not quoted from or even summarised the numerous witnesses who gave sworn evidence that they thought they were following the Rules. Again, the evidence that supports me and contradicts the Committee’s findings is simply ignored.
Committee comment: Mr Johnson was alerted to the possibility of breaches of the Guidance by his Principal Private Secretary, Martin Reynolds. It is not correct that there is no evidence that it was obvious to others. Mr Johnson has that evidence from a senior No. 10 official as well as the evidence of Lee Cain and Jack Doyle’s WhatsApp message.
The interpretation of the guidance
12. The Committee now accepts that I am correct that the guidance required social distancing “wherever possible” and that the instruction that “only absolutely necessary participants should physically attend meetings” was one that “usually” rather than always applied. However, despite my reading of the guidance being correct, and the Committee having to accept that its own reading was wrong, the Committee somehow concludes that my interpretation was a “contrivance to mislead the House”. Again, the Committee appears to have come up with a standard that applies only to me.
13. These are just a few examples of why I reject the findings in the document. In due course, I hope to have the opportunity to set out my objections to the Committee’s findings in full without demonstrably unfair restrictions placed upon my right challenge them.Committee comment: The Committee did not erroneously interpret the Rules and Guidance. It considered Mr Johnson’s interpretations and considered that they were false.
Committee comment: If Mr Johnson had submissions about the provisional conclusions and recommendations he should have made them to this Committee and to the House not reserved them for some future discussion of an unspecified nature.