Is partygate all in the past? That’s what Rishi Sunak is hoping. He sent Penny Mordaunt to the Commons this afternoon to back the Privileges Committee report into Boris Johnson, while saying the vote on sanctions for Johnson himself ‘is a matter for individual members’. The chamber had far more opposition MPs in it than Conservatives. Sunak himself has packed his diary so he is unlikely to attend the Commons for the vote.

Labour’s aim for the debate is to tie Johnson very firmly to the current administration. Shadow leader of the Commons Thangam Debbonaire gave a furious speech in which she accused Sunak of being too weak to take a position on the report. She also argued that Johnson ‘claims the public don’t care, that we should all simply move on’, but that public anger was running deep and that members should not ‘dishonour their constituents’ by abstaining:

The final area I want to cover in my speech is the current Prime Minister’s reaction to this report and where it leaves standards in Parliament and public life more generally, because it’s painfully clear he is not strong enough to turn the page on his predecessor. When stories or scandal like this one cut through with the public, it offers the Prime Minister the chance to press the reset button, to show leaderships, get to grips with the issue, tackle it head on, but this Prime Minister is simply too weak to do so. Despite promising integrity, professionalism, accountability at every level, he’s shown he’s too weak to stand up to Boris Johnson, which is profoundly dangerous because if we can’t have a Prime Minister that stands up for standards, what have we left? All we’ve heard so far is mealy mouthed statements.

She added that ‘we should know where he stands’ and asked if Sunak planned to say anything after the vote.

Westminster has often been too quick to forget things the public can’t forgive

Unsurprisingly, Theresa May has also spoken in favour of the Privileges Committee’s report, and commended their work, ‘dignity’ and ‘service. She paid tribute to Harriet Harman for chairing the committee, and also argued that supporting this report would be a step towards restoring trust in parliament and demonstrating its sovereignty (she gave a wry smile as she used this term).

When Harman spoke, she was interrupted by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who talked about the ‘perception of bias’ as a result of Harman’s tweets about partygate. But as the debate is going on, the mood of the chamber itself is largely one that is supportive of the Committee, rather than trying to undermine it.

Westminster has often been too quick to forget things the public can’t forgive: politics had moved on from the Lib Dem tuition fee U-turn by 2015, but voters hadn’t. The same might be the case for the shadow that partygate ends up casting on the Conservative party. The problem for Sunak is that even if it isn’t, there are a number of other incidents he also has to persuade the electorate to forget from his party’s even more recent past, including Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, and the mortgage ‘time bomb’. Even those who aren’t reliving Covid may have other things they are nonetheless very annoyed with the Tories about – matters it’s a little harder for Sunak to stay away from.