I feel sorry for Warrington South MP Andy Carter. There, I’ve said it in public, I really do have a massive amount of sympathy for him.

Of course, my sympathy is, to use a government phrase ‘specific and limited’ and is restricted only to a task he will be taking on in the near future – helping to decide if his boss, prime minister Boris Johnson, is a liar (don’t all shout at once).

Sorry, calling Mr Johnson a liar is unparliamentary language and would send the Speaker of the House into a fit of consternation.

So let’s get this right.

Andy Carter is one of seven MPs who make up the cross-party Privileges Committee and now the police and civil service inquiries into ‘partygate’ are over, that committee can begin its inquiry into whether or not Johnson deliberately misled the Commons (apparently, deliberately misleading the House isn’t quite the same as lying although they sound pretty similar to me).

Hannah White, writing on the Institute for Government website said: “The task, as directed by the House of Commons, is to decide whether Johnson misled the Commons in his various statements about partygate, and whether – if he did so – that amounts to a contempt of parliament.

“They will need not only to focus on his precise words in response to specific questions but whether the totality of the prime minister’s assertions over several months were deliberately calculated to frustrate parliamentary scrutiny of events in No10 during lockdown.

Their answer to this question is of fundamental constitutional importance. If they believe that – on the balance of probabilities – the prime minister did mislead the House (and did so knowingly), then he has broken the fundamental convention of ministerial accountability to parliament which underpins its ability to hold government to account.”

The Privileges Committee doesn’t have any power in its own right but reports its conclusions to the House which will then vote on whether to endorse its findings and any recommended sanction.

But the agony for Mr Johnson (and Andy Carter for that matter) will drag on a little longer than anticipated because the Commons first has to agree to replace the chair Chris Bryant with another Labour member for the duration of the inquiry.

Mr Bryant recused himself because of public comments he made about Mr Johnson having lied so it looks like his mind has already been made up.

This is serious stuff. Unusually for a parliamentary committee, the Privileges Committee can summon MPs to appear before it, so if the backbenchers decide that – in addition to calling for the papers, records and photos gathered by Sue Gray – they need to hear from the prime minister in person, he will have no choice but to appear, or to be held in contempt of parliament.

The make-up of the committee is such that it while it has a Labour chair, it has an in-built majority of Tories and my guess is they will do everything they can to avoid accusations of a whitewash so don’t be surprised if they take the opportunity to question Mr Johnson in person.

#And I for one will be glued to my TV watching that.

Anyway, back to why I have some sympathy for Mr Carter. The poor bloke is going to be front and centre in seeking to get to the truth, not only about partygate but about whether Mr Johnson lied – sorry, deliberately misled – the Commons.

This feels very much like a classic no-win situation.

Find he didn’t deliberately lie and face accusations of a whitewash, find he did deliberately lie and suffer the wrath of the Johnson-loving cabal. I wouldn’t want to hold my boss’s fate in my hands quite like that.

I do, however, trust Mr Carter and his fellow MPs on the privileges committee.

They also sit on the Committee on Standards, that found former cabinet minister Tory MP Owen Paterson guilty of ‘an egregious case of paid advocacy, that he repeatedly used his privileged position to benefit two companies for whom he was a paid consultant, and that this has brought the House into disrepute’.

Paterson was suspended from the House for 30 sitting days, resigned and saw his previously ultra-safe seat of North Shropshire won by the Liberal Democrat.

I wonder if a similar fate lies in wait for Mr Johnson.