The beginning of the end for Boris Johnson?
The Rundown by PoliticsHome
PoliticsHome
4.1 • 105 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
Discussing Boris Johnson’s evidence on what he knew about lockdown parties, presented to the Privileges Committee this week, Tory peer and a former deputy mayor under Johnson, Lord Stephen Greenhalgh and the Conservative MP for Buckingham Greg Smith, join PoliticsHome's Alain Tolhurst and Nadine Batchelor-Hunt.
Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced by Nick Hilton for Podot, edited by Laura Silver
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home. |
| 0:10.9 | I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and we'll be to discuss the fallout from Boris Johnson's |
| 0:14.4 | evidence, the Privileges Committee this week, and what it means for the future Conservative Party |
| 0:17.7 | is Tory Peer and a former deputy mayor under Boris Johnson, Lord Stephen Greenall, |
| 0:21.7 | the Conservative MP for Buckingham, Greg Smith, and making a podcast debut today is my colleague, |
| 0:26.0 | our political reporter, Nadine Bachelor Hunt. So I'm going to start with you, Nadine, just |
| 0:32.6 | explain what it was that we saw on Wednesday in terms of the Johnson's testimony. What was it about? |
| 0:37.6 | And what was the committee trying to prove, essentially? Yeah. So what we saw on Wednesday was the |
| 0:42.5 | committee essentially carry on with an investigation into whether or not Boris Johnson, knowingly |
| 0:47.1 | or recklessly, misled Parliament. Initially, it was, you know, did he mislead Parliament? He |
| 0:51.3 | since admitted that that was the case, but his defences he didn't realise that he was doing that, and that he genuinely believed that he was following the rules and |
| 0:59.2 | he was following the guidance. So what the committee's job now is to do is essentially say, what is this |
| 1:04.0 | true? Is this a kind of a believable account of events? And so what we saw yesterday was Boris Johnson |
| 1:09.7 | being grilled on that really in |
| 1:11.9 | quite a lot of detail. Included, you know, clips of him in Parliament being played back to him, |
| 1:16.6 | images of him at leaving drinks or his birthday gathering. And, you know, and it was very kind of |
| 1:22.3 | a forensic, you know, at one point Boris Johnson was shown a picture of, I think it was the event on the 13th of November 2020 and asked, you know, do people here look like their social distancing? |
| 1:33.3 | Do they look like they're within the guidelines? |
| 1:35.6 | So, yeah, that's what we, that's what we saw. |
| 1:38.2 | And then the kind of the outcome of that committee will come in the coming months. |
| 1:41.8 | And what the punishment will be will be decided by that |
| 1:44.6 | committee and then if there's any punishment and then their recommendations will be put to MPs |
... |
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