Though opposition politicians called him out, only one member of his own Conservative party called on him to resign.
LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced Parliament on Tuesday as an awkward pioneer in British politics: a confirmed lawbreaker who misled fellow lawmakers but remains ensconced in the nation’s highest elected office.
Apologizing profusely for his recent police fine for breaching coronavirus restrictions, Mr. Johnson tried to move on from a scandal over illicit Downing Street parties that has threatened his hold on power. The war in Ukraine and a lack of obvious successors to him have conspired to keep him in his job, at least for now.
But Mr. Johnson’s political resilience did not mask the weighty legal and constitutional issues at stake. Opposition lawmakers hammered the prime minister for flouting the rules he imposed on others and accused him of misleading Parliament when he claimed that none of the social gatherings held in his office had been improper.
“He knows he’s dishonest and incapable of changing, so he drags everybody else down with him,” said Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. He urged backbench members of Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party not to follow “in the slipstream of an out-of-touch, out-of-control prime minister.”
Only a single Conservative lawmaker, Mark Harper, called on Mr. Johnson to resign. Several echoed the arguments of his cabinet ministers that the scandal was a distraction at a time when Europe is facing its gravest security crisis since World War II. Forcing out their leader now, they said, would be a mistake.
Still, the angry, emotional tenor of the debate revealed how deeply the scandal has blackened Mr. Johnson’s reputation. No prime minister in living memory has been formally designated as a lawbreaker, and he faces the prospect of additional fines for attending other illicit parties. Tory lawmakers began drifting out of the chamber as the debate wore on, suggesting limits to the party’s backing for him.
Mr. Johnson stuck to his penitent tone, apologizing more than a dozen times, though he never explicitly admitted to breaking the law, when asked directly. He was especially contrite about his previous statements to Parliament, which pose a particular danger to him since they have been exposed as misleading, either intentionally or unwittingly.
“It did not occur to me, then or subsequently, that a gathering in the Cabinet room just before a vital meeting on Covid strategy could amount to a breach of the rules,” Mr. Johnson said. “That was my mistake and I apologize for it unreservedly.”
Ministers caught lying to Parliament are expected to resign under rules written in what is known as the ministerial code. As recently as 2018, a Conservative lawmaker, Amber Rudd, quit as home secretary after admitting that she had “inadvertently misled” lawmakers over government targets for removing illegal immigrants.
“The ministerial code is quite clear: deliberately misleading Parliament is a resigning offense since it prevents Parliament doing its job of scrutiny,” said Vernon Bogdanor, an expert on constitutional issues and professor of government at King’s College London. “The trouble is that there is no means of enforcing this principle against a prime minister if his party continues to support him.”
Indeed, the ultimate arbiter of the ministerial code is the prime minister himself. Mr. Johnson has disregarded this system of checks and balances before, in 2020, when they involved a member of his government.
That was when Mr. Johnson’s independent ethics adviser, Alex Allan, concluded that the home secretary, Priti Patel, had breached the ministerial code in her treatment of members of her staff, even if she was not aware she was bullying them. Despite that finding, Mr. Johnson decided that Ms. Patel had not breached the code and should not resign, and it was ultimately Mr. Allan who quit.
Now Mr. Johnson is in the odd position of being a prime minister who is accused of breaking the code, making him effectively the judge and jury in his own case. He has made it clear that he has no intention of stepping down, declaring that the best way to come back from this scandal is to deliver on behalf of the British people.
“It’s something the people who drew up the ministerial code didn’t really anticipate happening,” said Hannah White, deputy director of the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank. Under what she called the “good chap” theory of government, the prime minister would typically have resigned before getting to this point.
Understand Boris Johnson’s Recent Troubles
Turmoil at Downing Street. A steady drip of disclosures about parties that violated lockdown rules has ensnared Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain in a scandal that could threaten his hold on power. Here is what to know:
The lack of any mechanism to punish a prime minister who is found to have misled Parliament, Ms. White said, exposed a flaw in Britain’s unwritten constitution and political arrangements.
“If it’s OK for the prime minister to say whatever they want when questioned by the House of Commons and then just say ‘Oh well, I genuinely thought that was true and now I realize that it’s not,’ then there is no actual mechanism for the House of Commons to hold the government to account,” she said.
Mr. Johnson will face a vote on Thursday on whether his conduct should be referred to a formal parliamentary investigation. With a roughly 80-seat Conservative majority, that is highly unlikely to happen. But it will have the effect of putting Conservative lawmakers on the record in their support of Mr. Johnson — something that opponents could use against them in future elections.
On Tuesday, opposition leaders offered a tangy foretaste of those attacks.
“A lawbreaking prime minister — just dwell on this,” said Ian Blackford, the leader of the Scottish National Party in the British Parliament. “A prime minister who has broken the law and remains under investigation over additional lawbreaking. Not just a lawbreaker, a serial offender. If he has any decency, any dignity, he would not just apologize; he would resign.”
Nor are critics impressed with the way that Mr. Johnson’s allies have compared the fine he was given for breaking lockdown laws with a speeding ticket. The prime minister steered clear of that comparison on Tuesday.
For the critics, the biggest cost of the scandal may be diminished public trust in government. Covid restrictions were particularly hard on families with relatives who ended up in the hospital, where they sometimes died alone, barred from seeing their loved ones. Many of those people have expressed outrage that Mr. Johnson and his colleagues, who imposed those rules, did not abide by them.
“In our strange Constitution, all depends on public feeling,” Professor Bogdanor said. “If the public feels strongly enough, they could compel a prime ministerial resignation by writing to their M.P.s, by Conservative voluntary workers refusing to do voluntary work, and by votes in the local elections.”
As it happens, Britain will hold local elections on May 5. They loom as perhaps the ultimate test of whether Mr. Johnson will survive this scandal.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
