Boris Johnson has labelled the report as a “charade”.Credit:Bloomberg
Johnson,who dramatically quit as an MP on Friday after receiving its draft findings,launched a blistering attack on the committee in his resignation statement,accusing it of “egregious bias” and claiming its MPs were determined to “drive me out of Parliament”.
The UK’sprime minister from July 2019 until September 2022 and a former mayor of London,Johnson was one of Britain’s most controversial leaders in recent times and the most powerful advocate of the Brexit cause. He took Britain out of the EU in January 2020 but his leadership was immediately engulfed in the coronavirus crisis.
He accused the cross-party committee in charge of investigating the breaches of being a “kangaroo court” in his response to the report on Thursday.
He repeatedly targeted committee chairwoman Harriet Harman,accusing her of holding “prejudicial views”,as well as the panel’s most senior Conservative member,Sir Bernard Jenkin.
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“The committee is imputing to me and me alone a secret knowledge of illegal events that was somehow not shared by any other official or minister in Number 10. That is utterly incredible. That is the artifice,” he said.
“I was wrong to believe in the committee or its good faith. The terrible truth is that it is not I who has twisted the truth to suit my purposes. It is Harriet Harman and her committee,” he said.