Boris Johnson’s independent ethics adviser Christopher Geidt has quit following disagreements over Partygate.
The shock resignation thrusts the prime minister back into crisis, after he last week won a vote of confidence in his position among Tory MPs by a narrower than expected margin of 211 votes to 148.
In a statement, Lord Geidt gave no explanation for his decision, saying only: “With regret, I feel that it is right that I am resigning from my post as Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests.”
He is the second of Mr Johnson’s ethics advisers to resign, following the departure of Sir Alex Allan in November 2020 after the prime minister overruled his finding that home secretary Priti Patel had bullied staff.
In a scathing public rebuke to the PM last month, Lord Geidt warned Mr Johnson was at risk of placing the ministerial code in a place of “ridicule” over the Partygate scandal.
He said there were “legitimate” questions over whether Mr Johnson had breached ministerial standards and made a veiled threat to quit if the PM continued to insist there was no case to answer.
His intervention then forced Mr Johnson to release a detailed explanation of why he did not believe that his fixed penalty fine for breaking Covid lockdown laws did not amount to a breach of the ministerial code of conduct.
In a preface to his delayed annual report on ministerial standards on 31 May, the ethics adviser said that Mr Johnson had failed to heed advice repeatedly conveyed to No 10 that he should make a public statement on whether he had abided by the code.
Failure to do so would put him in the position of having to advise the PM to launch an inquiry into himself and then resign when Mr Johnson refused to do so – which would put the code “in a place of ridicule”, said Lord Geidt.
But Mr Johnson responded that Lord Geidt had not raised the issue directly with him and blamed the situation on a “failure of communication between our offices”.
Appearing before a panel of MPs on Tuesday, Lord Geidt hinted that he might have launched an inquiry into Mr Johnson’s behaviour over lockdown-breaching parties at No 10 if the powers had been available to him at the time.
He told MPs: “It’s reasonable to say that perhaps a fixed penalty notice and the prime minister paying it may have constituted not meeting the overarching duty under the ministerial code of complying with the law.”
Speaking just a day before his eventual decision to quit, Lord Geidt repeatedly refused to say if he had threatened to resign, as he painted a rosy picture about the greater access to the prime minister and powers he now had.
He spoke with the PM “regularly”, he said – declining to say if that was weekly or monthly – insisting: “The door is open.”
