“On the basis of assurances that I received from those with direct knowledge, I honestly believed that these events were lawful work gatherings,” he wrote. Yet much of his defence appears to rely on claims from his senior team that the rules and guidance had not been breached. The committee identified at least four occasions where Johnson may have misled MPs, including when he told MPs in December 2021 that no rules or guidance were broken, even though subsequent investigations by the senior civil servant Sue Gray and the Metropolitan police found otherwise. In his defence, Johnson rejected the suggestion that photographs of events at No 10, which show staff breaching social distancing rules, were problematic, arguing it was “implausible” he would have allowed the official photographer to take them if he felt they were evidence of law-breaking. The committee published four previously unseen photographs of Downing Street gatherings featuring bottles of alcohol, concluding there had been a “culture of drinking” that had persisted even as restrictions were put in place. Johnson responded that this suggested he had “deliberately” lied to parliament, adding: ”If it was ‘obvious’ to me that the rules and guidance were not being followed, it would have been equally obvious to dozens of others who also attended the gatherings I did.” He said most of them did not consider these events to have broken the rules either. However, in its interim report the committee said the evidence “strongly suggests” breaches of guidance would have been “obvious” to the then prime minister at the time of the gatherings as he drew up the rules and announced them repeatedly in public. He added: “He cannot be treated as a credible witness.” “It is no secret that Dominic Cummings bears an animus towards me, having publicly stated on multiple occasions that he wanted to do everything that he could to remove me “from power”. The only exception, he said, was from the assertions of his “discredited” former chief adviser Dominic Cummings, which were not supported by any documentation.

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