The new prime minister has not been announced yet, but Lord Marland – an ally of Boris Johnson – has already been on Newsnight to talk about the ‘distinct possibility’ of him having another run at the top job – after taking some time to ‘put hay in the loft’, in other words to build up his bank balance. The Johnson factor will be an irritant to whoever succeeds him. It won’t take much to get his partisans talking about a return for the Tory king over the water, and Johnson himself will play along with this: just look at the various ways he refused to rule out a comeback on his farewell tour.

One obvious threat to his comeback chances is the privileges committee’s investigation into whether he misled the House of Commons. The government has just published work by the QC David Pannick, who says that the inquiry is wrongly looking at whether Johnson misled parliament at all, rather than whether he misled parliament deliberately.

Pannick, in his conclusion, said that the committee’s process is ‘fundamentally flawed in a number of important respects’ and that it was ‘proposing to adopt an unfair procedure’. The committee’s report is not subject to judicial review. But, if it were, Lord Pannick says:

‘A court hearing a judicial review application brought by Mr Johnson would declare the committee’s report to be unlawful.’ 

It remains to be seen how parliament responds to the executive publishing legal work on the role of one of its committees.

Inadvertently misleading parliament is not a breach of the ministerial code or parliamentary procedure as long as the record is corrected as soon as possible. (This is reasonable: ministers can misspeak or genuinely misunderstand a question.) What Johnson would need to explain is why he took the length of time that he did to correct the record.

Johnson’s partisans have had a fair few pops at the committee over the summer. The question is whether this high-profile campaigning against it is the most effective way for Johnson to deal with it.