LONDON (AFP) – Former United Kingdom (UK) prime minister Boris Johnson on Thursday hit out at “absolutely absurd” portrayals of partying in Downing Street during the COVID-19 pandemic, as he faced a second day of questioning at a public inquiry.
Johnson, 59, was forced from office last year after public anger at revelations about the series of COVID-19 lockdown-breaching parties dubbed “Partygate”.
But he insisted to the inquiry that perceptions of the scandal were “a million miles from the reality of what happened”. It follows the ex-leader apologising on Wednesday for “the pain and the loss and the suffering” caused by the pandemic on his much-anticipated first day in the witness box, and accepting “mistakes” had “unquestionably” occurred.
Nearly 130,000 people died with COVID-19 in Britain by mid-July 2021, one of the worst official per capita tolls among Western nations. Johnson has faced a barrage of criticism from ex-aides for alleged indecisiveness and lack of scientific understanding, as well as for the Downing Street culture that facilitated Partygate.
“I continue to regret very much what happened,” Johnson said on Thursday when asked about the scandal, before branding “dramatic representations” of it “a travesty of the truth”.
“The version of events that has entered the popular consciousness about what is supposed to have happened in Downing Street is a million miles from the reality of what actually happened,” he added. His aides and officials “thought they were working very, very hard – which they were – and I certainly thought that what we were doing was…within the rules,” Johnson added.
Police last year fined the former leader – and his current successor Rishi Sunak – as well as dozens of staff for flouting the COVID-19 restrictions they set by attending gatherings in Downing Street.
A parliamentary inquiry concluded Johnson had repeatedly misled Parliament over the parties, and he resigned as a lawmaker shortly before its findings were published earlier this year.
Johnson’s pushback came as the lawyer for the inquiry – created to learn lessons from the country’s response to the health emergency – grilled his contentious decision-making as the virus repeatedly re-emerged in 2020.
The ex-leader defended his choice to delay a national lockdown during a second wave of COVID-19, and his internal use of the phrase “let it rip” to refer to a possible so-called herd immunity strategy.
