Opinion: 'To attack Privileges Committee's integrity is unforgiveable'

This is thanks to the anguished outpourings of former Tory ministers Jacob Rees-Mogg (sorry, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg) and Nadine Dorries along with now resigned Foreign Office Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith, former Home Secretary Dame Priti Patel, Tory MPs Mark Jenkinson, Sir Michael Fabricant, Brendan Clarke-Smith and Dame Andrea Jenkyns, and peers Lord Cruddas and Lord Greenhalgh.

What links all of these is the fact they are ardent supporters of disgraced former Prime Minister, the liar Boris Johnson who were accused of waging a coordinated campaign to interfere with a Commons investigation into Johnson.

Of course the ex-PM quit as an MP after the Commons privilege committee found he misled Parliament over Covid breaches at No 10.

In a subsequent report, the committee accused the allies of Mr Johnson of mounting ‘vociferous attacks’ on its work but the report also conceded that: “Free speech is at the heart of parliamentary democracy.”

This was leapt on by Johnson’s friends who said the committee was trying to shut down freedom of speech.

In fact, while the report defends the right to freedom of speech it states Rees-Mogg et al attempted to ‘impugn the integrity of the committee’ or ‘lobby or intimidate’ committee members to the extent it could be a contempt of Parliament.

The concept of freedom of speech is actually enshrined in law under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act which states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.

"This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

And that’s fine as far as it goes. But Article 10 does not allow for a free-for-all for everyone to be able to say whatever they want, whenever they want.

And that is also enshrined in law, stating: “The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society… for the protection of the reputation or rights of others.

And this is a key point. Anyone who speaks or writes in public will be well aware of this. Yes, you can hold strong opinions. I do, and I also know many of the Guardian’s readers disagree with me and don’t hold back at telling me so.

And that’s fine. But what you can’t do is accuse someone of wrongdoing without being able to prove it and that’s one of the occasions where freedom of speech meets the restrictions imposed by the Human Rights Act.

So back to the whinging Boris Johnson supporters. 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’.

Of course, Rees-Mogg hid behind the old ‘freedom of speech’ argument saying: “It must be possible to criticise parliament... No one likes being criticised but it’s fundamental to free speech to be able to criticise politicians. If you don’t like being criticised, you shouldn’t be a politician.”

Now while I don’t like Rees-Mogg or his politics, I do believe he is an intelligent man who will understand the difference between criticism and personal attacks on the integrity of the seven MPs (four of them Tories like Rees-Mogg) who sat on the committee.

And no, it’s not ‘freedom of speech’ or honest criticism to accuse people – Parliamentarians or otherwise – of operating a ‘kangaroo court’ or engaging in a ‘witch hunt’ because the implication of those words is that the committee members had acted in a dishonest or immoral way.

It’s easy to dismiss stories such as this as being part of the Westminster bubble but it comes hard on the heels of Boris Johnson’s disastrous premiership and the trashing of standards in public life.

As Rebecca Dobson Phillips says on the website ukandeu.ac.uk: “The abiding image of Johnson’s administration will perhaps be forever coloured by cases of blatant rule-breaking and rule-bending, representing a widening chasm between public ‘expectations’ of integrity and the ‘behaviours’ tolerated at Westminster; accompanied by the undermining of processes designed to control such behaviours.”

The privileges committee is one of those processes that should be able to control parliamentary behaviour and to attack its integrity is unforgiveable.