13 September 2023 , 17:02
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Theresa May has savaged Boris Johnson over his Partygate rule-breaking and the “damaging” impact it had to voters' trust.
The former Prime Minister told the BBC: “There were so many people up and down the country who were working desperately hard to make sure that they met the rules. I remember one woman saying to me that she'd not been able to be with her father when he died. And then they saw these things happening in No10.
“I raised a question in the House of Commons to Boris Johnson about whether it was that they didn't understand what the rules meant or they didn't think they were there for them. And it was that sense from the public, that it was one rule for the public and one rule for the politicians that I think was damaging.”
Mr Johnson stood down as an MP earlier this year ahead of a brutal Commons report that found he lied and lied over Partygate after the Mirror exposed how lockdown-busting gatherings had taken place in Downing Street. This newspaper first broke news of the scandal in November 2021, with bombshell reports of parties in No10 the previous Christmas. Mr Johnson and Rishi Sunak were both slapped with fines over a lockdown-busting birthday party for the PM in No10 after a police investigation.
In an interview with Nick Robinson's Political Thinking podcast, Mrs May was quizzed about whether Mr Johnson was the reason she wrote her new memoir, the Abuse of Power. She attempted to dodge the question by saying she gives examples of various “institutions and individuals” in the book. But after being pressed again on Boris Johnson being one of those individuals, Mrs May did not reject it and only laughed awkwardly.
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Mr Johnson took over as Prime Minister in the summer of 2019 after Mrs May’s Brexit deal was repeatedly rejected. Asked about her frustration with not only Remainers but hardline Brexiteers, who she accuses in her book “of taking a sledgehammer to the constitution”, Mrs May said: “I think the way we saw - and in a sense this was shown later on by the prorogation of Parliament which the Supreme Court ruled to be unlawful when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister - there was a sense that the normal run of things, the normal way that we did things, some of these legal processes, had to be ignored or overturned in order to achieve what they wanted.
“Whereas my view is actually you work within the system and you can achieve what you want within the system. But it was this sense, and this is where I say the abuse of power, where…both sides were able to variously exercise their power, not to deliver what was in the interests of the whole, but to deliver what was in the interests of their particular view.”
Mrs May added that she thought Mr Johnson’s deal was a “bad deal”. “We had that period of time when it was really very difficult for Northern Ireland and difficult for people, supermarkets and so forth in Great Britain who were sending food over to Northern Ireland, all the checks and stuff that came as a result of Boris Johnson's deal," she said. “So that's why I think my deal would not have been in that position and would have been better.”
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