On Monday night, the House of Commons voted on Boris Johnson, supporting a report that claimed he intentionally misled the legislature about Partygate.
However, Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, and 225 of his former Conservative Party colleagues were not present.
So where did they go?
Instead of voting against the person who helped them win the most recent general election, the majority had made the decision to abstain from the Commons debate.
The majority of the cabinet members, including the prime minister, were busy during the vote on Monday night.
It had no effect on the Commons privileges committee's report, which was written after a year-long investigation, easily passing by 354 votes to 7.
Sir Bill Cash, Nick Fletcher, Adam Holloway, Karl McCartney, Joy Morrissey, and Heather Wheeler were among the Tories in the House of Commons who opposed it.
Mel Stride, the minister for work and pensions, later admitted to the BBC that he had stayed away from the vote because he believed that Mr. Johnson's potential 90-day suspension, if he hadn't already resigned from his position as an MP, was an excessive punishment.
On Sunday, Michael Gove, another cabinet minister, made a similar statement.
The truth is that we don't yet know what has happened to Rishi Sunak.
According to reports, the prime minister had important commitments on Monday.
He met with Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in the afternoon. He went to a health and social care charity's event that was held in the evening.
Downing Street replied that he was preoccupied with the future when questioned about missing the vote.
However, this was more than just a matter of logistics (a prime minister can move around fairly quickly with a police escort).
The question of whether his predecessor lied to Parliament has been avoided at great lengths by Mr. Sunak.
On Thursday morning, just prior to the release of the committee's report, he was questioned about it. He claimed he didn't want to influence their decisions.
He had the weekend to consider the report's conclusions before being asked how he would vote on Monday.
He avoided giving a direct response on several occasions by stating that he did not want to direct the votes of other MPs because they were not receiving instructions from party managers, or "whips," regarding how to vote.
As things stand, we are therefore unaware of the prime minister's opinion of the report. Asking will continue.
But Mr. Sunak finds that uncertainty to be advantageous.
He would have been viewed by Boris Johnson's allies as having committed yet another act of treachery if he had voted to support the report.
Many people would never have pardoned him. In the upcoming months, they might have made life challenging.
Other Conservatives who passionately spoke in support of the privileges committee in the Commons on Monday would have been outraged if he had rejected the report.
It would have, in the eyes of his detractors, been in violation of the pledge he made to uphold integrity, professionalism, and accountability when he took office as prime minister on the steps of Downing Street.
Abstinence, however, carries some risk.
You can count on opposition parties to make a strong case for why Mr. Sunak is unqualified to render a verdict on Mr. Johnson.
He has been dubbed "too weak to lead a party too divided to govern" by Labour, while the Liberal Democrats have called him a "cowardly cop-out."
