Lord Geidt clears his employer Boris Johnson of ministerial code breaches. He would, wouldn’t he?
We all know the Tories think we’re stupid; accept this nonsense at face value and they’ll know it’s true.
A Tory peer, Lord Geidt, has apparently carried out an internal party review of the way refurbishment of the 11 Downing Street flat (occupied by Boris Johnson) was funded and found that Johnson – who is his boss, let’s not forget – was innocent of any wrongdoing.
And nobody should believe a word of it.
Geidt said the Cabinet Office paid the costs and charged them to the Conservative Party, on the understanding that a trust was being set up to provide the funds.
This trust was never set up and the bulk of the cash came from Lord Brownlow, a Tory donor and former vice-chairman of Johnson’s Conservative Party from 2017 to July 2020 – as had been claimed in press reports.
With regards to the flat, [Geidt] said: “It is clear from the record that while a serious and genuine endeavour, the trust was not subjected to a scheme of rigorous project management by officials.
“Given the level of the prime minister’s expectations for the trust to deliver on the objects he had set, this was a significant failing.
“Instead, the prime minister – unwisely, in my view – allowed the refurbishment of the apartment at No 11 Downing Street to proceed without more rigorous regard for how this would be funded.”
In other words, Johnson claimed ignorance of the situation – but ignorance is no excuse.
Besides, he told us he had paid for the works himself, and that is plainly a lie.
He gets £30,000 a year as an allowance for such works – more than most of us earn in full-time work – and it still wasn’t enough. Reports suggest that the changes to the Downing Street flat cost around £200,000 in total.
Still, the Electoral Commission has launched its own investigation.
The commission said it was “satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to suspect than an offence or offences may have occurred”.
At the end of the day, it wouldn’t have matter what Geidt found, as power to decide whether a breach of the ministerial code has occurred rests with the prime minister – Johnson himself.
Knowing how corrupt he is, we know that he was never going to admit an offence that may require him to resign from his job.
We are left with several conclusions:
That Johnson is guilty as sin, that the government is utterly corrupt because he is leading it, and that Geidt and Brownlow have implicated themselves in that corruption by whitewashing their boss.
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