The Partygate affair, as it became known, dealt a major blow to Johnson’s administration, and he resigned as prime minister in 2022 following an exodus of top ministers.
Johnson was fined by police over his attendance at one gathering and was later found to have knowingly misled parliament about his knowledge of the gatherings. He rejected the findings of the committee investigating Partygate, and dramatically quit as an MP.
In an interview with ITV News airing Friday night, Johnson said his “blanket apology” for Covid rule-breaking “at the beginning” of the scandal had opened the door to “accusations that then rained down on officials who’d been working very hard in Number 10 [Downing Street] and elsewhere.”
“And by apologizing I had sort of inadvertently validated the entire corpus and it wasn’t fair on those people,” he said.
Johnson was originally due to be interviewed by the BBC, but the sit-down was pulled at the 11th hour after BBC presenter Laura Kuenssberg mistakenly sent her briefing notes to the former prime minister.