Boris Johnson has announced he will be standing down from parliament with immediate effect, after the Privileges Committee recommended a ten-day suspension for his conduct over partygate.

There will be a by-election in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Johnson will not contest his seat.

In his resignation letter, the former prime minister attacks the committee, saying it has made clear to him in a letter ‘that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament’.

He insists that ‘they have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons’, and that ‘they know perfectly well’ that he was not doing this.

It is not a huge surprise that Johnson has not submitted to the decision of the committee. That was entirely the tenor of his evidence before them: that he felt this inquiry was not fair, that it was unfairly chaired, and that it was part of a wider political agenda against him. But what is significant about this letter is that he is not just attacking Harriet Harman and the committee. He is also attacking his own party.

He writes that ‘the Conservative party has the time to recover its mojo and to win the next election’, but lists the obstacles he sees in its way, including not making the most of Brexit, not cutting taxes, ‘passively’ abandoning a free trade deal, ‘junking’ policies helping people into housing and on animal welfare, and not delivering on the 2019 manifesto.

By the end of this letter it is very clear that Johnson wants the by-election to be about the future of the Conservative party and that he is not quitting politics with immediate effect in any way at all. Not that anyone ever thought he would.

Read his resignation letter in full here.