Lord Blunkett tore into Boris Johnson on BBC Question Time, saying he has “sucked the life” out of politics as a whole.
A Labour peer and former MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, Blunkett did not hold back when he was responding to a question from the audience – “is Boris Johnson’s political career dead and buried?” – on Thursday night.
Blunkett said: “What we’re dealing with is this character, this phenomena, Boris Johnson, who has sucked the life out of the rest of the political arena and all the real issues that we need to deal with.”
Former prime minister and ex-MP Johnson has dominated the news cycle once again this week, after the parliamentary privileges committee decided that he did deliberately mislead the Commons over partygate.
Johnson stepped down from parliament last Friday when he received an advance copy of the report, but he denounced it as a “witch hunt”, and has been incredibly critical of the committee in the days since.
Blunkett continued: “I’ve been reflecting over the last seven days, and we’ve had the demise of Berlusconi, we’ve had Boris take himself out of parliament and then blame everybody else that he’s gone, and we’ve had Trump in the United States.”
The peer was referring to the divisive figure, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s one-time prime minister who died earlier this week, as well as to the furore around former US president Donald Trump, who is facing criminal charges over taking classified documents when he left the White House.
As Blunkett neatly summarised it: “I think we’ve had the dead, the departed and the demented.”
But, the peer didn’t stop there, but continued to lay into Johnson and his attitude to life in office.
Alluding to the ongoing support for the ex-PM from a handful of loyalists, Blunkett said: “I think the sooner we actually come to terms with the fact that Boris had his go, he had his turn, he had his opportunity during Covid when he came out of hospital, to reinvent himself, to be a serious prime minister. And he didn’t.”
The peer also said this was not about the No.10 parties, but about how Johnson had undermined “a tradition as part of our constitution” by lying at the despatch box.
He pointed out that Johnson seemed happy with the inquiry ”until things started to be unravelled”.
Blunkett continued: “He was quite happy to take £245,000 of public money to pay for arguably, the most effective legal team in the country to defend him.
“And then he has the cheek to blame the committee, parliament, even his Conservative colleagues. He’s only got one person to blame: it’s Boris Johnson.”
On Monday, MPs will vote on whether to follow the committee’s recommendations to stop Johnson ever receiving the former member’s parliamentary pass.
Just a week after he left parliament, Johnson is also said to have signed up to a deal with the Daily Mail as their new weekly columnist.