Boris Johnson faces a battle for his future in parliament after a cross-party committee found there was significant evidence he misled MPs over lockdown parties, and that he and aides almost certainly knew at the time they were breaking rules.

The damning report includes one witness saying the then-prime minister told a packed No 10 gathering in November 2020, when strict Covid were in force, that “this is probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now”.

Other new evidence includes a message from a No 10 official in April 2021, six months before the first reports of parties emerged, saying a colleague was “worried about leaks of PM having a piss-up – and to be fair I don’t think it’s unwarranted”.

The details came in a report from the Commons privileges committee, a seven-strong group of MPs, four of them Conservatives, which has been tasked with discovering whether Johnson misled parliament in denying any wrongdoing, and then if this was deliberate.