Former cabinet ministers and allies of Boris Johnson have been accused of launching an “unprecedented and coordinated” campaign to undermine the inquiry into whether he misled parliament over Partygate. The finding came in a new report by the privileges committee, which posed a fresh problem for Rishi Sunak as it recommended toughening up the rules on interference in such inquiries and condemned the behaviour of former ministers. Seven Tory MPs and three peers – including a serving government minister – were named and told their behaviour risked discrediting a fundamental arm of the system of checks and balances in parliament. The former cabinet ministers Nadine Dorries, Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg were named, as were other former frontbenchers Brendan Clarke-Smith, Mark Jenkinson, Andrea Jenkyns and Michael Fabricant. Zac Goldsmith, a Foreign Office minister, and two other Tory peers – Lord Cruddas and Lord Greenhalgh – were similarly criticised. Earlier this month, the privileges committee said it would write a special report on the issues it encountered during its 14-month inquiry into Johnson’s Partygate denials. In its ruling, the committee found he had committed five contempts of parliament. Its follow-up report, published on Thursday, said some senior Tories had waged a campaign across newspapers, radio and social media to discredit the committee’s work and the seven MPs that serve on the cross-party group.
They all tried to “undermine procedures of the House of Commons”, and two MPs in particular – Dorries and Rees-Mogg – were said to have mounted “the most vociferous attacks … from the platform of their own hosted TV shows” on TalkTV and GB News respectively. “Attacks by experienced members are all the more concerning as they would have known that during the course of an investigation it was not possible for the privileges committee to respond to the attacks,” the report said. The four Tory members of the committee were particularly targeted, the committee said. It noted: “This had the clear intention to drive those members off the committee and so to frustrate the intention of the house that the inquiry should be carried out, or to prevent the inquiry coming to a conclusion which the critics did not want. “It had significant personal impact on individual members and raised significant security concerns.” If such abuse continued in future, no MPs would want to serve on the committee that investigates the most serious breaches of parliamentary rules, the report continued. “If that happens … the house might feel compelled to cede to an external authority the responsibility for protection of its rights and privileges.” Lord Cruddas and Lord Greenhalgh were found to have been among more than 600 people who emailed Tory members of the committee using a template devised by the Conservative Post website. An article on the website inviting people to lobby the committee said that all four Tories should “step down” immediately to send a “strong message that we will not tolerate politically motivated attacks against our party”. Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow leader of the Commons, told Sky News on Thursday that privileges committee members had been put under “intolerable pressure” from “atrocious comments” by fellow MPs. Examples of such behaviour cited by the privileges committee included a tweet from Dorries calling it a “kangaroo court” that had “changed the rules” to suit its own narrative, and Rees-Mogg, who said it “makes kangaroo courts look respectable” and was a “political committee against Boris Johnson”. Several of those named in the report hit back. Clarke-Smith, who was appointed as an education minister in the overhauled government Johnson led after a series of mass resignations last July, said that he had never referred explicitly to the committee in his criticisms. The tweet cited by Clarke-Smith on 9 June said Johnson quitting as an MP and partly leaking the results of the report on him was “the end result of a parliamentary witch-hunt which would put a banana republic to shame”. In his defence, Clarke-Smith said he was “shocked and disappointed to be named in this new report” and said it raised “serious questions about free speech in a democratic society”. Mark Jenkinson, a former whip, also said he had never referred to the committee before its final report was published. He said the tweet referenced by the committee, about a “witch-hunt”, also on 9 June, was about “the media”.