Not really. He’s backtracked. Originally he said that Johnson should resign simply because he was under police investigation (which was frankly absurd). When it was put to him that he was not now doing as he said Johnson should do, he repeated his announcement that he would resign only if fined.
An admirable stance and one that I agree with. I think Johnson should have resigned too although that situation has become complicated by the Ukrainian situation, regardless of arguments to the contrary.
I’m not sure he called for him to resign for being under investigation. Seems like every time he requested his resignation it was for breaking the ministerial code for lying to the House. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T_nTPlgalk.
We can debate if Johnson lied knowingly but I think saying he called for him to resign because of the police investigation is slightly incorrect - unless there are other videos/sources I’m not seeing. This clip is from The Telegraph though and I would have thought they’d go to great lengths to show that if it was the case.
A little ambiguous with the wording, I think you can take from it either that he needs to resign for being under investigation or that he needs to resign because he has been denying it for months (which has been the consistent argument from Starmer) but I agree calling for anyone to resign for being under investigation would be stupid. Would turn the police into a political weapon that could potentially be used against anyone.
I disagree. If you had a PM being investigated for colluding to have someone assaulted, for example, would that make their position untenable? I think it does personally.
He didn’t mate. @Kopstar keeps putting up things that he thinks supports his position, when they clearly don’t.
The severity of Johnson’s rule breaking was entirely because he lied about his involvement every step of the way - first that there were no parties, then he wasn’t there, then he was, but no rules were broken, then he was ambushed by a fucking cake or something. It was a shaggy level gaslighting by a serial liar.
Starmer never called on him to resign simply because of an investigation. He called on him to resign because of a repeated pattern of telling lies to parliament - the police investigation proved that his earlier claims that there wasn’t a party, and his subsequent one that he wasn’t there, were bollocks.
I’m saying the possibility of that being abused would appear to be there. I think many politicians would have little trouble getting investigations opened into whoever they like. Theoretically at least it could create a roundabout of PMs being deposed by false accusations.
Yes he did, as per the above tweet from the horse’s mouth.
See point 1. The police investigation is not proof of wrongdoing. The fines are where wrongdoing has been established and those didn’t come until several weeks later.
No, if you read it properly, and actually paid attention at the time, he didn’t.
Boris Johnson was already shown beyond any doubt to have lied to Parliament repeatedly about his involvement in Downing Street parties. The Police Investigation was, at that point, the cherry on top of a particularly rotten cake.
I can read, thanks. Nice slur about my disability though, classy. There’s also the small matter of Starmer himself not refuting that was what he meant.
Johnson is grandstanding while trotting out his tiresome Churchill impressions solely to try and dig himself out from under the mountain of shit that he now inhabits.