Boris Johnson will still be able to win the next general election for the Conservative Party, a cabinet minister has said, amid open speculation about his political future.
Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis backed the PM to lead his party into the next election, saying he “rightly” apologised in the Commons yesterday for a Downing Street garden drinks party held on 20 May 2020, during the UK’s first national lockdown.
But asked if Mr Johnson can continue as prime minister if he is found to have misled parliament by saying he did not break coronavirus rules, a matter which is in theory a resigning issue, Mr Lewis dodged the question,
“That is making a pre-judgement on what the report will find,” he told Kay Burley.
Live COVID updates as Johnson faces damaging headlines
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Lockdown parties: What we know
Four of Mr Johnson’s own Conservative backbench MPs have explicitly called for him to resign, saying his position is now “untenable” – leading to questions of whether he could be forced out of Number 10 by his own party.
At PMQs on Wednesday, the PM confessed to attending the Downing Street “bring your own booze” event.
He admitted he went into the Number 10 garden “just after 6pm on 20 May 2020 to thank groups of staff” before going back into his office “25 minutes later”.
Mr Johnson said he had “learned enough” about multiple claims of lockdown-breaching parties in Downing Street “to know there were things we simply did not get right” and acknowledged the public “rage” about the event.
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Johnson thought garden party ‘was work event’
But, Mr Johnson said, he “believed implicitly that this was a work event”.
“With hindsight, I should have sent everyone back inside,” he added. “I should have found some other way to thank them.”
The gathering is understood to have been attended by around 40 people.
The prime minister offered his “heartfelt apologies”, but Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called on Mr Johnson to “do the decent thing and resign”, claiming his position is “no longer tenable”.
Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross has also demanded the prime minister’s resignation over the Downing Street drinks party row.
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Douglas Ross has called for Boris Johnson to stand down as Prime Minister over the Downing Street lockdown party scandal.
“I don’t want to be in this position, but I am in this position now, where I don’t think he can continue as leader of the Conservatives,” Mr Ross said.
Fellow Tory MP William Wragg, the chair of the Commons’ Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, also called for his party’s leader to go, saying he feared the “partygate” row was “simply going to be a continuing distraction to the good governance of the country”.
Sir Roger Gale and former minister Caroline Nokes are the other two Conservative MPs who have so far urged Mr Johnson to quit after his apology failed to quell the anger over the May 2020 gathering.
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Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused Boris Johnson of ‘lying through his teeth’
But speaking to Sky News on Thursday morning, Mr Lewis said he believes “the prime minister is the right person to be prime minister”.
“I think we will be able to go forward and win a general election,” the Northern Ireland secretary told Kay Burley.
“We have got work to do. We have got to deliver on exactly on what the prime minister set up, which is some of the biggest important reforms dealing with issues the country would have liked to have dealt with years ago, like health and social care, issues in Northern Ireland that haven’t been dealt with in decades.
“This is somebody who wants to deal with that and do it in a way that delivers for everybody in the UK, and that is why I think he will win the next election.”