Five things we learnt from Johnson’s evidence to MPs

Boris Johnson rocked up at the Liaison Committee today, fresh from last night’s bonding dinner with 250 Tory MPs. And the Prime Minister displayed no trace of a hangover as he produced a competent performance during his largely uneventful ninety-minute grilling. Select committee chairs are generally a fairly hostile bunch: because they’re elected by the whole House, Tory critics of the PM tend to be more successful than his defenders. Today’s session was a much more muted affair than last year’s outing, with Johnson’s interrogators mainly choosing to focus on Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis. Even so, some news lines did emerge from Boris Johnson’s appearance.

1) His possible partygate defence

Pete Wishart, an arch critic of the PM, was first up at Liaison Committee. Unsurprisingly the SNP man opted to lead on partygate, asking Johnson whether he was one of the 20 people in No. 10 who has received a fixed-penalty notice from the Metropolitan police.