Caroline Lucas blasts Boris Johnson as 'serial liar'

The Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion said "different kinds of measures" are needed in Parliament and said it is "impossible" for the government to hold the Prime Minister to account when he "systematically lies with impunity".

Ms Lucas is among a group of MPs concerned Boris Johnson has given misleading statements during Prime Minister’s Questions and that there has been a failure to correct the record.

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She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme today: “Unfortunately I say he is a serial liar.

“Essentially the rules that we have were written for another era where we didn’t live with a Prime Minister who shows a kind of Trumpian disdain for the rules.”

Parliamentary rules don’t work when we have a PM who’s gone rogue

Eg Ministerial Code which leaves PM as judge of standards is useless when it's PM himself who routinely breaks standards

We need new rules for this Trumpian era of British politics

Me on @BBCr4today pic.twitter.com/QIviWBuXLj

— Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) April 28, 2021

She said the rules currently set out that it is the responsibility of ministers to correct the record and the role of the Speaker is “very constrained”, while the ministerial code is based on the premise the Prime Minister is the ultimate judge of standards.

“That is farcical because it obviously never occurred to the authors of the code that the person in breach of the standards might be the Prime Minister himself, so effectively he’s allowed to police his own actions,” Ms Lucas said.

Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has backed a proposal for the commons procedure committee to look into “how perceived inaccuracies could be corrected” in a bid to improve transparency.

He met six opposition party leaders over their concerns yesterday, including Ms Lucas, the Lib Dem’s Sir Ed Davey and the SNP’s Ian Blackford.

The opposition MPs are writing to the committee chaired by Tory MP Karen Bradley, asking it to consider how misleading statements should be corrected.

If the committee did agree to consider the request, and then proposed rule changes, a Commons vote would be required in order to approve them.

Sir Lindsay last month slapped down Mr Johnson in the Commons as he faced claims of lying over Labour’s position on NHS funding.

The Speaker told MPs: “It is not dishonourable to make a mistake, but to seek to avoid admitting one is a different matter.”

The Prime Minister’s then press secretary Allegra Stratton would neither apologise nor correct the record when repeatedly challenged by journalists over Mr Johnson’s disputed remarks.

The meeting with the Speaker came after the opposition MPs wrote to him saying they believe Mr Johnson’s behaviour “amounts to a contempt of the House”.

“This is not a question of occasional inaccuracies or a misleading use of figures: it is a consistent failure to be honest with the facts, or to correct wrong information at the earliest opportunity when misleading information is given,” they wrote.

It comes as an inquiry is launched into how Mr Johnson funded refurbishments to his Downing Street flat.

The Electoral Commission said there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect multiple offences may have been committed.