Boris Johnson: Watch and follow LIVE as as former PM faces the Privileges Committee as he defends himself against claims he lied to Parliament

Boris Johnson insisted guidance allowed for moments where social distancing “could not be perfectly observed”.

He said: “When it came to things like social distancing, as the guidance explicitly provides for, it was not possible at all times to have perfect social distancing and that you could have mitigations.”

Of an event on November 27 2020, he added: “What we were trying to do was follow the guidance to the best of our ability – that meant that sometimes social distancing could not be perfectly observed.”

The former Conservative Party leader said he thought it “unlikely” he, as claimed by an unnamed No 10 official, made a joke about a leaving-do being “probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now”.

Boris Johnson, asked about the remarks he was alleged to have made on November 27 2020, told the Privileges Committee: “I don’t remember saying those words.

“I think it unlikely that I would have said those words given what I have had to say to the committee just now about my memory of the event.

“My visual memory of the event was that it was much more, as Cleo Watson describes, it was a clutch of people around that table … I don’t remember people being four or five deep.”

Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin intervened as Mr Johnson looked to go on, saying: “I’m sorry, you are giving very long answers and it is taking longer than we need.

“You are repeating yourself quite a lot. Can we just get on with the questions? Thank you very much.”

Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin told Boris Johnson the coronavirus guidance “does not say you can have a thank you party”.

Mr Johnson said: “I believed that this event was not only reasonably necessary but it was essential for work purposes.”

Lee Cain and Dominic Cummings had left their jobs “in very, very difficult and challenging circumstances”, and “it was necessary to steady the ship, it was necessary to show that there was no rancour, the business of the Government was being carried on – that’s what we had to do, that’s what I had to do”.

Veteran Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin suggested Boris Johnson could have avoided the contempt proceedings if he had given a fuller account to Parliament.

The former prime minister said: “Why I believed, when I stood up on December 1, that the guidance was followed completely at all times in No 10, what picture I had in my head – and why that doesn’t conflict with that picture (of Lee Cain’s leaving-do) – the answer is that I knew from my direct personal experience that we were doing a huge event to stop the spread of Covid within the building.

“We had sanitisers, windows were kept open, we had people working outdoors wherever they could, we had Zoom meetings, we had restrictions on the number of people in rooms, we had Perspex screens between desks and – above all – we had testing, regular testing, which went way beyond what the guidance described, and which, in my view, helped mitigate the difficulties we had in maintaining perfect social distancing.”

Sir Bernard said: “I’m bound to say that if you said all that at the time to the House of Commons, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here. But you didn’t.”

Giving an account of the birthday party for which he was fined, Boris Johnson told MPs: “It never occurred to me – or I think the current Prime Minister – at the time that the event was not in compliance with the rules and the guidance.

“At about 2.22pm on June 19, 2020 I went into the Cabinet Room where I worked after getting back from a long external visit.

“I stood at my desk – briefly – before another Covid meeting began and had a kind of salad.

“A number of officials came in to wish me a happy birthday. No one sang, the famous Union Jack cake remained in its Tupperware box, unnoticed by me, and was later discovered and eaten by my private secretaries.”

A “slightly exaggerated” version of the event was briefed to The Times “with singing and cake eating” and yet nothing untoward was detected “either by the reporter or by millions of eagle-eyed readers”.

That meant that when he addressed MPs “it did not for one second occur to me that this event, the one event for which I was fined, would later be found to be somehow against the rules”.

“And the same goes for all the events I attended.”

Boris Johnson defended his attendance at some of the events covered by the partygate inquiry.

He told the Privileges Committee: “I know you will point to the photos and then to the guidance and what I said, and you will say ‘it must have been obvious that the guidance was being breached’. But that is simply not true.

“My beliefs and my remarks to Parliament were indeed based on my knowledge of those events, but you have to understand how I saw them and what I saw during the period I was there.”

Referring to the leaving dos he attended, Mr Johnson said: “I know that people around the country will look at those events and think that they look like the very kind of events that we, or I, were forbidding to everyone else.

“But I will believe until the day I die that it was my job to thank staff for what they had done, especially during a crisis like Covid, which kept coming back, which seemed to have no end and where people’s morale did, I’m afraid, begin to sink.

“But never mind what I think, the more important point is that the police agreed – they didn’t find that my attendance at any of these farewell gatherings was against the rules.”

Social distancing was not “necessary or possible” in Downing Street due to the working conditions in the “cramped” 18th century townhouse, Boris Johnson said.

The former prime minister said his comments that Covid guidance was followed in No 10 was based on “my understanding of the rules and the guidance”.

He told the Privileges Committee: “That did not mean that I believed that social distancing was complied with perfectly. That is because I and others in the building did not think it necessary or possible to have a two-metre, or one-metre after June 24 2020, electrified forcefield around every human being.

“Indeed that is emphatically not what the guidance proscribes.

“It specifically says that social distancing should be maintained where possible, having regard to the work environment.

“It was clear that in No 10 we had real difficulties in both working efficiently and at speed and in maintaining perfect social distancing.

“It is a cramped, narrow, 18th century townhouse. We had no choice but to meet day in, day out, seven days a week in an unrelenting battle against Covid.”

Boris Johnson told the Privileges Committee he does not think it “can seriously mean” to accuse him of lying.

He said: “If it was obvious to me that these events were contrary to the guidance and to the rules then it must have been equally obvious to the dozens of others including the most senior officials in the country.”

He added it “must have been obvious to others in the building including the current Prime Minister”.

Mr Johnson said the “overwhelming evidence” the committee has assembled is “that these individuals believed that the rules and the guidance were being complied with”.

He referred to the “total silence” of any written or electronic record of concerns people wanted to raise with him and said the committee did not have evidence of any emails or WhatsApp messages that show he was warned about rule breaking before he made statements to the House of Commons.

“You haven’t got any such evidence because that never happened,” he said.

“You are not only accusing me of lying, you are accusing all those civil servants, advisers, MPs, of lying about what they believed at the time to be going on, and as far as I know you’re not giving any of them the chance to explain themselves with their own oral evidence.

“I don’t think you seriously mean to accuse those individuals of lying and I don’t think you can seriously mean to accuse me of lying.”

Boris Johnson suggested that if it should have been obvious to him that rules were being broken, it should also have been apparent to current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

“If it was obvious to me that these events were contrary to the guidance and the rules, then it must have been equally obvious to dozens of others, including the most senior officials in the country, all of them – like me – responsible for drawing up the rules.

“And it must have been obvious to others in the building including the current Prime Minister.”

Boris Johnson said it was “nonsense” to suggest that it should have been obvious to him that rules were being broken in No 10 because of the pictures of him at events.

To suggest there were “illicit events in No 10 while allowing these events to be immortalised by an official photographer is staggeringly implausible”.

He said: “It seems to be the view of the committee and sadly many members of the public that they show me attending rule-breaking parties where no one was social distancing. They show nothing of the kind.

“They show me giving a few words of thanks at a work event for a departing colleague. They show me with my red box passing on the way to another meeting or heading back into my flat to carry on working, often late into the night.

“They show a few people standing together – as permitted by the guidance – where full social distancing is not possible and where mitigating measures are taken.

“They show events which I was never fined for attending.”