Boris Johnson set to submit Partygate dossier, saying he didn’t deliberately mislead MPs – UK politics live | Politics

Members of the RMT union have voted to accept a pay offer from Network Rail, my colleague Gwyn Topham reports.

Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, has said that its eight MPs will vote against the deal to revise the Northern Ireland protocol on Wednesday.

But the party has been engaged in an extensive consultation on the proposal, and in his statement Donaldson said that voting against was indicative of the party’s “current” position. He said that the deal represented progress in some areas and that the DUP was still seeking “further clarification, re-working and change”.

He said:

Since the announcement that the “Stormont Brake” is to be debated and voted upon in parliament on Wednesday there have been a number of indications that this vote will be read as indicative of current positions on the wider Windsor Framework package.

Our party officers, the only decision-making mechanism in our party on these matters, met this morning and unanimously agreed that, in the context of our ongoing concerns and the need to see further progress secured, whilst continuing to seek clarification, change and re-working, that our members of parliament would vote against the draft statutory instrument on Wednesday.

We will continue to work with the government on all the outstanding issues relating to the Windsor framework package to try to restore the delicate political balances within Northern Ireland and to seek to make further progress on all these matters.

Some Tory Brexiters have said that the position of the DUP would be crucial in deciding whether or not they could back the deal, and so this decision will increase the chance of some Conservatives voting against the deal too.

There is no prospect of Rishi Sunak losing, because Labour will vote with the government. But a large revolt would undermine his authority, and revive claims that party divisions on Brexit are irreconcilable.

Downing Street has backed Penny Mordaunt, leader of the Commons, in urging Conservatives not to attack the privileges committee’s investigation into Boris Johnson. The PM’s spokesperson told journalists this morning:

We think this is a committee that’s carrying out a function asked to by parliament, it’s a parliamentary matter, and the leader of the house set out how we would want parliamentarians to engage with it.

Some Conservatives believe the inquiry is rigged against Johnson, and some of the coverage in pro-Tory papers has amplified this view. Conservative Post, an obscure Tory website, is urging its readers to send a standardised email the four Conservative MPs who sit on the committee expressing their “deep concern and disappointment” about the MP’s participation in the “Labour-led investigation” and urging them to resign from the committee to protect their “integrity”.

Peter Cruddas, a former Tory treasurer who was given a peerage by Boris Johnson even though the House of Lords Appointments Commission expressed propriety concerns, has also been using his Twitter feed to attack the inquiry. He posted this this morning.

Lord Cruddas also heads the Conservative Democratic Organisation, which argues for more grassroots democracy in the party but which is widely seen as a closet ‘bring back Johnson as leader’ campaign.

Mordaunt seemed to be referring to Cruddas in the Commons on Thursday last week when she urged all parliamentarians to respect the work being down by the privileges committee. She said:

This house asked the committee to do this work. We referred this matter to the committee for it to consider; we asked it to do this work and to do it well, and it should be left to get on with it.

That is the will of this house, and I think a very dim view will be taken of any member who tries to prevent the committee from carrying out this serious work, or of anyone from outside the house who interferes.

On a personal level, an even dimmer view will be taken of anyone from the other place [the House of Lords] who attempts to do similar.

Here is a question from below the line that is worth answering.

Andrew,

Isn’t the rule that you just have to mislead parliament. There’s no qualification that you must know you’re misleading parliament?

Some of the media coverage of the privileges committee hearing on Wednesday has implied that the hearing will focus on claims that he deliberately misled MPs – in other words, that he lied – when he said the Covid rules were followed at all time in No 10 at staff gatherings. Although much of the hearing will focus on this, in fact the “charge” against Johnson is much wider.

The committee is investigating whether Johnson’s Partygate answers amounted to a contempt of parliament.

The focus on whether Johnson knowingly misled MPs is understandable because doing this is a breach of the ministerial code and a resignation offence.

But the committee is not in charge of policing the ministerial code, which is a matter for No 10. It investigates conduct which counts as “contempt of parliament” which is defined in Erskine May as:

any act or omission which obstructs or impedes either house of parliament in the performance of its functions, or which obstructs or impedes any member or officer of such house in the discharge of their duty, or which has a tendency, directly or indirectly, to produce such results, may be treated as a contempt even though there is no precedent of the offence.

In a report published in July last year, which included a memo from Eve Samson, clerk of the journals, the committee said that misleading MPs could count as a contempt of parliament even if it was not intentional. It said that intention – ie, whether MPs were misled deliberately – would be relevant when considering penalties.

In its most recent report, published earlier this month, the committee summed up its position in this way:

This inquiry is considering: what Mr Johnson said to the house; whether what he said was correct or whether it was misleading; how quickly and comprehensively any misleading statement to the house was corrected; and, if it is established that the house was misled, whether this actually constituted a contempt of the house by impeding the functions of the house or tending to do so.

If a statement was misleading, we will consider whether that was inadvertent, reckless or intentional.

If we conclude it was in any way reckless or intentional we will consider what sanction to recommend to the house.

It is now accepted by everyone, including Johnson, that MPs were misled. The report publised last month hinted that the committee thinks Johnson was at best reckless when he misled MPs, because he should have known that the rules had been broken, but the committee has not yet taken a final view on this.

The committee is also concerned that Johnson did not correct the record, when he realised MPs had been misled, by using the “well-established procedures of the Commons”. There are normally around 100 formal written ministerial corrections issued per session. Johnson never issued one over Partygate, although he did tell MPs verbally, after he was fined and after the Partygate report was published, that the rules had been broken – contrary to what he originally said.

Lord Pannick, Johnson’s legal adviser, argued in a submission to the committee last year, that it would have to show he had deliberately misled MPs to prove contempt. In the new submission he seems to be arguing that it has made up the offence of recklessly misleading parliament just to trap Johnson. (See 9.38am.)

But the committee argues that a misleading answer can be a contempt even if it was unintentional, and that there is no rigid, closed definition of contempt. In its report last year, it quoted this line from Erskine May:

It is … impossible to list every act which might be considered to amount to a contempt, as parliamentary privilege is a ‘living concept’.

Peter Walker

A promised “major announcement” from Reform UK at a press conference in Westminster (see 10.55am) has turned out to be the return to the party fold of 11 MEPs who were in the Brexit party, its predecessor incarnation.

There had been speculation that Nigel Farage, spotted in the room where the event was taking place, could be taking a bigger role.

But while he did speak to the gathering, Farage stressed that his role remained “honorary and advisory”, and that Richard Tice remained in charge.

In his own speech, Tice said he believed there was a big opening for his party over issues such as immigration and Rishi Sunak’s revised Northern Ireland post-Brexit deal.

He then introduced a series of former MEPs, among them Ann Widdecombe, Ben Habib and June Mummery.

While big news in Reform UK circles, these are not names with Farage’s heft, so this feels a bit less than a gamechanger.

DUP MPs are meeting today, reportedly to discuss how they will vote when the Commons debates Rishi Sunak’s Northern Ireland protocol deal on Wednesday.

But Ian Paisley has already said that he will definitely be voting against, and that he expects the other seven DUP MPs to do so too. In an interview with the News Letter in Belfast, he said:

I am categorically voting against, and I would be surprised if my colleagues do not join me.

My initial reaction to the Windsor Framework was that I didn’t think it cut the mustard in terms of addressing our seven key tests (on restoring NI’s place within the UK internal market).

After taking time to study it and a least one legal opinion on it, and going through the details, and also having conversations and messages back and forward to the secretary of state, I am still of that opinion – that it doesn’t address any of our seven tests.

It is the old substance dressed up in a new package with a ribbon around it, but it hasn’t actually changed, or addressed the fundamental issue of Northern Ireland trade being disrupted in our internal UK market.

Paisley set out his opposition to the protocol deal last month, in the foreword to a report on it by the Centre for the Union, a unionist thinktank. That report, which included an opinion from John Larkin KC, a former attorney general for Northern Ireland, said the new deal fails the first of the DUP’s seven tests, which is that any deal must uphold the provisions on the Acts of Union 1800, which said all parts of the UK should be covered by the same rules on trade.

Paisley and his fellow DUP MP Sammy Wilson have always been particularly hostile to the protocol. Other DUP MPs are thought to be more inclined to support it, or at least to abstain.

Kate Forbes, the Scottish government’s finance secretary and SNP leadership candidate, has said the turmoil in the party exposed at the end of last week confirmed her view that it needed to change. On Saturday Peter Murrell, chief executive of the party and Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, resigned after it emerged that the party had misled journalists to cover up a 30,000 fall in membership figures.

In an interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland, Forbes said:

I obviously strongly believe that the events over the last few days – which have of course hurt, and I think bemused, a lot of SNP members not least myself – have confirmed my calls from the very beginning of the contest, which is that we need change in the SNP, we need change in government and that change needs to be based on some very fundamental principles of honesty, competence, transparency.

I’ve said from the very outset that continuity won’t cut it, that the status quo wasn’t good enough and that we couldn’t just continue to go on as we were going on if we wanted different results.

And that’s not just about policy, it’s also about the delivery of those policies and the culture that accompanies it.

But Forbes also said she was not in favour of the contest being re-run. She said she had confidence in the process and wanted it to reach its conclusion, which is due with the announcement of the new leader on Monday 27 March, a week today.

My colleague Libby Brooks has a good article here on how people in Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, where Forbes is the MSP, view her candidature.

Ministers have given another contract extension to Avanti West Coast, saying the poorly performing rail operator had made improvements to services that were scaled back drastically in recent months, prompting chaos and a customer backlash.

Here is the news release from the Department for Transport. And here is our story by my colleague Peter Walker.

Christian Wolmar, a rail specialist, says this shows how the current rail franchise system does not give the government a proper alternative if a provider is underperforming. “Just nationalise the lot,” he says.

Good morning. Boris Johnson’s comeback prospects were never particularly strong at the start of the year and since Rishi Sunak unveiled his Northern Ireland protocol deal – which showed that Conservative MPs mostly want to move on from the Johnson-era war of attrition with the EU, as Johnson admitted himself in a revealing and defeatist speech – he has looked even more irrelevant to any serious debate about the party’s future.

But he still has an unrivalled ability to command media attention and, even though his appearance before the Commons privileges committee is more than 48 hours away, he is still dominating some of the front pages.

Two and a half weeks ago the committee published new evidence about how Johnson may have misled MPs about Partygate. “The evidence strongly suggests that breaches of guidance would have been obvious to Mr Johnson at the time he was at the gatherings,” the committee said in its report.

Today, ahead of his evidence session on Wednesday afternoon, Johnson will submit a dossier to the committee making the case for the defence. The committee is expected to publish it, possibly this afternoon. The document will reportedly contain evidence backing up Johnson’s claim that, when he told MPs he thought the Covid rules had been followed at all times at gatherings in No 10, he was doing so in good faith, on the basis of advice from his aides. But it will also reportedly argue that the investigation is unfair.

In its story, the Daily Telegraph quotes “a source close to Johnson’s defence team” as saying:

The committee will find Boris did not mislead parliament. It has to be based on the evidence which is totally in his favour.

He has always said he didn’t mislead parliament and now he will be shown to be right. He is in good spirits and he has a great defence. He is up for it and confident.

The lawyers will say a lot about how unfair the process has been. We think the committee moved the goalposts on the definition of contempt, by bringing in a new idea of recklessly misleading parliament rather than deliberately misleading parliament.

We think there is absolutely no precedent for that. We think they have changed the definition because they discovered there was no evidence that Boris acted wrongly in any way.

The dossier is also expected to include claims that past tweets by Harriet Harman, the Labour MP chairing the inquiry, show she is biased. Conor Burns, a prominent Johnson supporter, made this accusation in an interview last night, as my colleague Peter Walker reports.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Suella Braverman, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

2.30pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s outgoing first minister, gives a speech at the RSA in London.

3.45pm: Angus Robertson, the Scottish government’s constitution, external affairs and culture secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Scottish affairs committee.

Afternoon: The Commons privileges committee may publish the dossier from Boris Johnson rebutting claims he deliberately misled MPs about Partygate.

I’ll try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com.