Best Of

Top piece as usual, Cyclefree, but if I do have a criticism it is that it is too Met-oriented. There are four other Forces also under 'special measures'. That doesn't mean to say that those not in SM are necessarily good, they're just not bad enough to need outside help and controls.

Common sense suggests that far from being exceptional, the Met is the currently very visible tip of the iceberg. The whole Force needs a shake-up, from top to bottom.

I know. I have said as much in the many headers I've written on the police before.

I agree with @Cyclefree - 98%

We don't want the NI experience here - unless you want a police force that has a strange black hole for certain serious crimes.

I would suggest that the political parties get together, come up with a non-political candidate for Police Minister. Kick them into the Lords, with the understanding they'll serve a decade.

Otherwise the police will simply try and wait out a change in government and business as usual.

Dame Cyclefree has a certain ring to it. Also I'd kick their arses from here to eternity.

Alexander Horne, ex-parliamentary lawyer, doesn't think the Committee will recommend a suspension long enough to trigger a by-election, which is also my view. He says:

Even if the committee finds that Johnson has committed a contempt, the type of sanctions that it can recommend include anything from requiring him to apologise to the house, to proposing a suspension of ten days or more which could, in theory, lead to a recall petition and a possible by-election in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Given that its recommendation must be approved by the House of Commons, I would be surprised if the committee opted for the nuclear option unless it had very cogent evidence that Johnson had deliberately misled the House on these matters.

(Article in the Spectator, summarised in Guardian live blog at 14:40)

Yes, seems most likely. Johnson will be sanctioned but not severely enough to trigger a recall petition.

Labour won't be too upset, keeping Johnson as Uxbridge MP gives them a good chance of a Tory seat they would otherwise expect to take at the next GE.

I can't see how Labour loses out in any scenario. If the recommendation is for a suspension long enough to trigger a by-election, then either the House approves it (splitting the Conservative Party even more, and keeping Boris front-and-centre of the news for weeks), or it bottles it (again splitting the Conservative Party, and allowing the opposition to spread the blame from Boris personally to the whole party).

Alternatively, if Boris survives with a lesser sanction, there will still be divisions amongst the Tories, Boris remains as an irritant in Rishi's side and a focus for dissent, and hopefully he gets ditched at the GE anyway.

The one thing in the Boris self-exculpation which I have some sympathy with is his point about the curious incident of the cake. It does seem really odd, verging on completely bonkers, that the Met decided to issue a fine to Boris in relation to this particular occasion, which seems just about the least egregious of all the incidents. Even weirder that they also fined Rishi, who seems to have behaved perfectly correctly, arriving in the room purely for a meeting.

It shows that the law and its application were capricious, not that BoZo didn't break it.

My suspicion is that they went for that one specifically because they could also fine Rishi, and thereby avoid the accusation that they had it in for Boris personally.

If they'd given Johnson half a dozen fines, as was probably warranted, it would have made it a lot harder for him to survive as PM, and I presume the police really didn't want to be seen as responsible for defenestrating a PM.

Conservative MPs failed the country by not forcing him to resign earlier.

Put the two together and Britain looks to be a country vulnerable to a culture of corruption and impunity taking hold among its politicians and state bodies. I think there's ample evidence that the process is well-advanced and that the country is remarkably complacent/fatalistic about it.

This is why it is still vitally important that Johnson is nailed for lying to Parliament, and is ejected from Parliament as a result.