Boris Johnson has insisted the idea that evidence in diaries given to police might suggest further lockdown rule-breaking during the Covid pandemic is “absolute nonsense”. The former prime minister said a Cabinet Office decision to give entries from his official diary to the police without checking their contents with him was “ridiculous”. Whitehall officials looking into the response to Covid by Johnson gave the information to the Metropolitan police and Thames Valley police about gatherings at Chequers and Downing Street. The Times reported that friends of Johnson visited the country estate and the prime minister’s residence in central London. Johnson was fined for attending a gathering to mark his birthday in June 2020, months after he had been discharged from hospital when he had been seriously ill with Covid. It was one of the crises that marked his time in Downing Street and ultimately led to the end of his time as prime minister. Johnson was approached by Sky News at an airport in Washington DC on Friday during a visit to the US. He has spoken to groups about the war in Ukraine and also met former president Donald Trump. “You want my honest view, I think this whole thing is completely nonsensical,” he said. Asked what the entries show, he replied: “They merely record events in my day. “This whole thing is a load of nonsense from beginning to end … I think it’s ridiculous that elements in my diary should be cherrypicked and handed over to the police, to the privileges committee without even anybody having the basic common sense to ask me what these entries referred to. “There are tens of thousands of entries in the prime ministerial diary … None of them constitute a breach of the rules during Covid,” he said.
The privileges committee, which is conducting an inquiry into whether Johnson lied to parliament about the Partygate scandal, has also been informed of the new information. A spokesperson said: “The committee will take this evidence and Johnson’s response into account when considering its final report. The committee is making progress with its inquiry expeditiously.”