Page:Fifth Report - Matter referred on 21 April 2022 (conduct of Rt Hon Boris Johnson).pdf/92



Annex 3: Purported response of Mr Johnson to the Committee’s warning letter
Purported response of Mr Johnson to the Committee’s warning letter, received by the Committee 12 June 2023, with Committee comments

1. The Committee has provided me with a 36 page document entitled “Extract of Provisional Conclusions” (‘the document’). Despite the fact that they are said to be “provisional”, the Committee has declared that I cannot challenge any of its conclusions on the facts, nor comment on any matters in it with which I disagree. In short, the process adopted by the Committee denies me any opportunity to challenge their findings and conclusions, no matter how wrong, selective, unreasonable, illogical or unsupported by evidence. This cannot possibly be fair. "Committee comment: As Mr Johnson and his lawyers well know, the warning letter procedure is an opportunity after the evidence has been considered to respond to the Committee’s provisional conclusions and recommendations. It is not an opportunity to rehearse the evidence that has been received or to rehearse Mr Johnson’s disagreement with that evidence. Mr Johnson has had repeated opportunities to set out his evidence about the facts and has availed himself of those opportunities, in particular in the submissions that he made after all written evidence was available and after he had been questioned in the oral hearing."

2. To illustrate the invidious and unjust position in which the Committee has placed me, I set out below a critique of just a few of the Committees’ findings. This is merely a handful of the errors and injustices with which the document is riddled. "Committee comment: Mr Johnson had the opportunity to comment on the whole of the document containing provisional conclusions and recommendations but he now chooses only to selectively criticise. To adopt this approach is to undermine the workings of the House because the House is entitled to know what his criticisms are before he discusses them in public, something he implies he is going to do at paragraph 13."

3. As a preliminary issue, I note that the Committee criticises me for “failing to make any use” of the evidence that I insisted it obtain after my oral evidence session. This criticism illustrates perfectly, as Lord Pannick KC and Jason Pobjoy have pointed out, the unfairness of the Committee being investigator, prosecutor and fact-finder. My complaint, as the Committee will know from the correspondence, was that the Committee said that it would disregard any evidence that was not accompanied by a statement of truth. This meant that, had my legal team not intervened, the Committee was intending to disregard a great deal of evidence that supported me which, for some reason, it had not chosen to obtain. I had already made use of much of that evidence in my Submissions, which I adopted under oath at the oral evidence session, before I understood that the Committee