Punishingly brutal report is devastating for Boris Johnson

Let's be blunt: it says he lied.

The spine of the biography of Boris Johnson has his relationship with the truth running straight down it.

Sacked from The Times for making up a quote, when he was a young reporter. Sacked from the Conservative front bench for lying about an affair.

Just 40 weeks ago, Mr Johnson was prime minister, the figurehead of a government with a big majority.

Catapulted first to the backbenches and now out of Parliament too, the demolition of Mr Johnson's career by his own peers has been brutally quick.

Remember, today isn't about parties during Covid.

It is about the fundamental pillars upon which public life - and society at large - is constructed.

Conduct.

Behaviour.

Believability.

Integrity.

The sanctity of truth. The contempt for lies.

A committee of MPs, four Conservatives and three others, tasked with delivering their verdict. Those committee members could never have imagined finding themselves at the centre of an inquiry of such gravity.

Many are not widely known names.

I don't say that to deprecate or belittle them for a second, but to emphasise the power of Parliament.

A power Boris Johnson is feeling today like never before.

The crux of Mr Johnson's defence is this was cock up, not conspiracy.

That however forensic and conscientious this committee, how could it crawl into the mind of Mr Johnson to understand his intent?

It tried to do the former and claims to have managed to have done the latter.

"The committee now says that I deliberately misled the House, and at the moment I spoke I was consciously concealing from the House my knowledge of illicit events. This is rubbish. It is a lie," he claims.

One former cabinet minister I was talking to said - hoped - that "ex MPs become very ex very quickly".

They added, from reading the Tory MP WhatsApp groups and public statements in recent days, that Boris Johnson has only a shrivelled rump of parliamentary support.

But others will wonder if this report - as punishingly brutal as it is - may motivate a martyrdom, may rally support.

"Spiteful, vindictive and overreaching" is the verdict of one Boris Johnson supporter on the Tory backbenches, Brendan Clarke-Smith.

One minister said to me: "Boris is the sort of bloke who could fall down a manhole head first and still land on his feet."

But this is one heck of a manhole.

-bbc