It would be bad for the common good if Boris is seen to be brought down by the establishment

No, the privileges committee of the House of Commons is not, as some Boris Johnson supporters have alleged, a “kangaroo court”, rustled up for the purpose. Indeed, it is not a court at all. It is the standing body of MPS which examines the behaviour of one of their number and decides, subject to a parliamentary vote, that person’s fate.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there is something right with it. It avoids a curse of our times, which is to litigate in court what should be settled by democratic politics. Ultimately, only Parliament and – in due course – the electorate should judge its members’ political conduct.

Unfortunately, it does not automatically follow that such a committee’s methods are wise. Boris made a fair point in his opening remarks on Wednesday when he described the committee as being “investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury” all in one. This makes its proceedings unfair. It would have been more just, for instance, to have appointed an independent professional – perhaps a KC – as evidence-gatherer to lead the questions, with committee members interjecting where needed.

I feel that Harriet Harman, the committee chairman, may not sense this difficulty. Her tone on Wednesday at times felt “conclusionary”. The heavy necklace she wore like a chain of office reminded me of Lady Hale’s famous spider brooch in the Supreme Court hearing over prorogation – a fashion statement which simultaneously asserted authority and perhaps indicated her mood.

Anyway, the fact that the committee is composed of MPS and the conduct being investigated is that of a prime minister means the situation requires political analysis. Ms Harman says its members leave their party allegiances at the door when they deliberate. True, no doubt, but it is not really party (except in the sense of a leaving party) at stake here.

In party terms, Boris’s fiercest enemies sit, as so often in politics, on his own side. Many are ministers in the Conservative government that he involuntarily vacated. One is the present Prime Minister.

So we need to understand the political pressures on all the committee’s members. On one side are angry Boris-backers who feel he has been stitched up. These are quite powerful in public opinion, less so in Parliament. On the other is the pressure from all those Remainers, senior ministers, MPS, peers, the BBC, academics, officials, etc, who think exonerating Boris would be a corrupt whitewash.

In the circles in which the committee members move, this pressure is extremely strong. This may give the appearance that committee minds are already made up. Sir Bernard Jenkin told Boris: “I don’t think we agree with your interpretation of the guidelines.” People might think he was in effect saying that the committee’s minds were already closed to Boris’s evidence.

Yet Boris did make a strong case, though not a perfect one. As he kept having to remind his hearers, the truth of whether he knowingly, or recklessly, misled the Commons about breaches of Covid rules and guidelines in Downing Street depends entirely on his state of knowledge at the time, not on what subsequently happened. He argued that the rules had not been broken and the guidance, in its phrase “wherever possible”, allowed discretion to those operating it. Conditions in Downing Street made such discretion necessary.

Boris also pointed out – which everyone who knows the place experiences in all administrations – that officials, not the prime minister, run No10’s day-to-day arrangements. That is only sensible: the prime minister, after all, should be running the country.

In reference to these officials, another committee member, Sir Charles Walker, thought he had caught Boris out. No fewer than 126 people in Downing Street were eventually issued with fixed penalty notices, he said: surely that proved the obviousness of the problem?

On the contrary, Boris replied, it is evidence that what became clear with hindsight was not clear to most people involved at the time. That seemed a fair point, well made. It is credible, therefore, that Boris was neither reckless nor evasive in not seeking special legal advice before answering in Parliament: officials, so far as we know, had not thought this was needed.

Many, of course, never believe a word that issues from beneath the blond mop, but obviously no parliamentary inquiry can proceed on the basis that the accused is convicted before he opens his mouth. A more reasonable thing to say about Boris is that he is frequently sloppy – even that he is sometimes deliberately sloppy because it creates more wiggle room.

I agree with that. But most politicians do that often. It is not a fault for which colleagues should drive them from the House of Commons.

You may also say that the whole story proves the idiocy of the Covid rules and guidelines over which Boris presided. I agree with that, too, and it is wretched that such a liberal man authorised so much petty repression. But again, wrong policy is not a matter of personal turpitude which must be judged by a parliamentary committee. It is a failure that must be judged by the voters at a general election.

So what is the most likely outcome? It seems unlikely that the committee will clear the accused: they are too scared of the resulting obloquy. Yet I cannot see how the evidential basis is sound enough to state as fact that Boris deliberately misled the Commons.

Every day, ministers say things to Parliament which are not true (eg, “We have the greatest health service in the world”), but these are well short of being genuine, provable lies. What evidence has come forward that Boris cooked up a deliberate falsehood?

The likeliest thing, then, is that the committee will judge him “reckless”, a term to which it has been accused of resorting rather late in the proceedings. Is that definable? Should it end a political career? Was John Major reckless 30 years ago when he repeatedly said the pound would stay in the ERM when he must have known it very likely wouldn’t? No, he was like a soldier who must defend a position until it becomes absolutely untenable. The ERM episode gravely damaged his political career – rightly so – but it did not impugn his honour.

If Boris is judged reckless and suspended for 10 sitting days or more, the necessary percentage of his constituents will probably trigger a recall. There will then be a by-election and he, protesting at the whole process, will not stand in it. He might then pick up a safer seat at the next election or, in the event of a Tory defeat, after it.

How much would such a sequence of events matter? Not much, perhaps, in terms of the personal welfare of Boris Johnson. The rest of his life will continue to be a tragi-comic-epic encounter with triumph and disaster on a scale that exhausts the rest of us.

But in terms of the common good, I think it will be a bad thing if the most successfully controversial leader of our time is seen to have been defeated by process rather than by voters. It all goes back to Brexit, which was, among other things, the electorate’s gigantic rejection of the way our establishments had mishandled things for so long.

If those establishments are seen to be winning once more, there will be no peace either in the Conservative Party or, more importantly, in the country.

The privileges committee’s methods are not wise. The outcome may not matter much to Johnson, but it will for the body politic