Partygate: Can Boris Johnson recover from MPs' damning verdict?

Boris Johnson's parliamentary career has ended - at least for now - with angry protestations that he's done nothing wrong, in keeping with so much of how he's lived his entire life (if the testimony of his teachers and work colleagues is to be believed).

Because the Privileges Committee, which has a majority on it of Tory MPs, has ruled unanimously that he breached parliament's rules in multiple serious ways. And his response is angrily to deny any culpability.

Rather than apologise or even half-way accept its judgement, Johnson has simply gone on the attack, accusing the committee of making the "final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination" and of being "anti democratic".

There is also a classic contradiction in Johnson's statement. On the one hand he does not have "the slightest contempt for parliament".

The Privileges Committee's verdict is in - what's Robert Peston's?

But then he says that the actions of the committee, one of the most important parliamentary institutions, "are beneath contempt".

So although I have for years resisted the temptation to draw analogies between Johnson and Trump, this characterisation of himself as the victim of a conspiracy, and the contradictions in his defence, are pure Trump.

The big question is what Boris Johnson is seeking to achieve, in the face of the committee's findings that - on multiple occasions - he deliberately misled the House of Commons, deliberately misled the Privileges Committee itself, breached a duty of confidentiality to the committee, impugned the committee and was complicit in a campaign of abuse and intimidation against the committee.

These finding are of historic gravity. No prime minister, and very few MPs, have ever been found guilty of such transgressions.

And the proposed punishments - a 90-day suspension and the withholding of a pass to allow him to use parliament's facilities as non-member - are right at the top end of possible sanctions.

For the avoidance of doubt, the punishment was inflated by his decision on Friday to be hung for a sheep as a goat.

That was when he breached confidentiality by leaking the committee's general findings and said he was quitting as an MP rather than face the music.

But even before he lashed out, the MPs had already reached the unanimous decision that his repeated lies to parliament - that there were no parties in Downing Street and all Covid rules had been followed - merited a suspension of considerably more than 10 days.

Or to put it another way, the process that could have led to a by-election in his Uxbridge constituency would have been triggered, even without the last-minute compounding of his offences.

After a fraught debate on Monday, the House of Commons is bound to approve the findings and the sanctions.

Because although Johnson loyalists are today agreeing loudly with him that it's all desperately unfair, they are a small minority of Tory MPs.

Johnson knows that, and his appeal therefore is not to Tory MPs - who are largely embarrassed by his conduct and are rallying behind the current prime minister - but to public opinion.

There will be plenty of Tory members and supporters who will side with him, although opinion polls show that they are a small minority of the electorate.

And in the process of persisting with the charge that he's been done in with by a "kangaroo court", he is re-opening all those painful wounds for those whose loved ones were killed or permanently harmed by the pandemic.

Is there any chance that the weight of grassroots Tory opinion will help him make yet another comeback in a career littered with lesser but still serious "Just Boris" transgressions and setbacks?

It will be hard, in part because of the manner of his leaving.

What I mean is this: If the current Tory leader, or any future one, were to sanction putting him back on the list of approved candidates, which is the necessary pre-condition for standing as a Conservative in a general election, that Tory leader would be endorsing Johnson's attempted demolition today of important parliamentary process.

Could Sunak collaborate with Johnson in this attack on our system of parliamentary democracy? As a prime minister whose entire brand is about the importance of "fair process", that seems implausible.

In other words, parliamentary politics is over for Johnson as a Conservative, probably for years, possibly forever.

The Partygate: The Inside Story podcast brings you fresh revelations and our whistleblowers in their own words in the definitive behind-closed-doors story of how ITV News uncovered one of the biggest scandals of our era...