Dept. of Some-People-Don’t-Know-When-To-Quit: Boris Johnson has made a new submission to the Partygate Inquiry, effectively trying to have two bites of the cherry it offered him when it requested a response to its draft report last week.

And it seems Nadine Dorries only said she was going to resign as an MP on the same day Johnson actually resigned, and is now dragging her heels over whether to make it official or not – thereby clagging up the by-election procedure.

What a pair of clowns.

We don’t know much about what Johnson has written; only that he passed his new submission on to the inquiry at 11.57pm yesterday, in the knowledge that its members had intended to publish their report today (June 14).

It seems the intention was to delay publication of the report – but for what purpose? Members of the inquiry panel are hardly likely to change their minds about him after he branded them a “kangaroo court” in his resignation letter last week.

If he’s trying to limit the damage the report will do to him, one might argue that he should have thought of it before. His main – and ridiculous in many people’s opinion – contention is that he did not lie, but that won’t make any difference to the report. You may remember that This Writer lost a court case last November. I did not lie in those proceedings but the judge chose to believe a particular story and there was nothing I could do about it. Some times you just have to grit your teeth, bear it, and try to limit the damage by other means.

As for Nadine Dorries, the thrust of the BBC report seems to be that she has delayed her resignation because, while she remains an MP, she can use Parliamentary privilege to make her views known on any issue she cares to mention, without fear of legal consequences.

She may wish to dish some dirt on Tory government activities, to make prime minister Rishi Sunak look criminal, malevolent or incompetent (she blames him for taking preventing her from becoming a peer in Johnson’s resignation honours list).

Or she may want to contribute to the debate about the Partygate Inquiry’s findings.

She may time her resignation so that the by-election for her constituency takes place right before party conference season, providing the media with material that is potentially damaging to the Tories at a highly inconvenient moment for them.

She may even decide that she doesn’t want to quit after all, meaning her Tory colleagues will have carried out a lot of work for a by-election in Mid Bedfordshire for nothing.

By-elections to find replacements for Johnson and Nigel Adams, who also quit last Friday, are likely to take place on July 13 or July 20 – most probably the latter date.

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