No doubt, even allowing for some childish petulance, Boris Johnson thought himself jolly smart by skipping the House of Commons before the privileges committee published its report.
The likely sanction of suspension from the Commons has been rendered redundant, and the debate on the report will be missing his contributions. He has avoided a ritual humiliation in the chamber at the hands of those who he considers dolts and fools and, on his own side, those who owe their ministerial jobs and cushy parliamentary lives to his campaigning genius.
On his way out of the mother of parliaments, which he’s always held in contempt (in the colloquial sense of the word), he’s rubbished the privileges committee. Just for good measure, he’s also dragged the House of Lords Appointments Commission into a confusing row about honours, and also lobbed a few rocks at the entire Sunak administration along the way.
A huge cloud of chaff of colourful Johnsonian verbiage, in other words, has been thrown up about kangaroo courts, Nadine Dorries, tax and Brexit, all to distract from the central fact that is about to become his political epitaph: he lied to parliament. He also knew what he was doing: He’s a clown, but he’s not stupid.
Johnson’s big lockdown party lie is the one that he could not, in the end, fully escape from. It is the first time in his life that the truth has caught up with him properly. The lie – and the proof of the lie – is right there in the privileges committee report, awaiting release (though there have been leaks). It has destroyed his career, despite all the talk of comebacks. No wonder he’s angry.
We’ve become so inured to the idea of Johnson as a professional liar, and the Partygate saga has dragged on for so long, that we forget too easily the true magnitude of this moment. We’ve actually known about it ever since that training video of a mock press conference featuring his one-time aide Allegra Stratton emerged. She, with gallows humour, simply couldn’t justify the way they’d been breaking lockdown rules as a “work meetings”.
After that, Johnson sought time and again to close the story down, even as the evidence mounted, with more and more implausible denials. The Sue Gray Report, now much maligned, was merely a simple and accurate chronology of what had happened and when, with some mild rebukes about the culture in Johnson’s operation, and sensible recommendations.
The public was already appalled, and remains so, even as time has passed. Johnson calculated that the public memory is short, and if the truth ever did come out then it’d all be too late and we’d want to “move on”, as the mantra went.
Allies of Johnson’s went around trivialising the affair, using the line (no doubt coined by Johnson) that he’d been “ambushed by cake”. It was his way of attempting to charm his way out of trouble again.
During Partygate, and again now, he tried to deploy all the techniques he’d honed since he began his career in deceit at Eton – self-deprecatory joking, carefully worded non-denials, blaming others, distraction, attacking his opponents and accusers, evasion, answering questions that aren’t relevant, dishing out worthless non-apologies, even once hiding in an industrial fridge. Now he’s run out of road. The albino greased piglet has at last been stuck – and by Harriet Harman of all people; precisely the kind of progressive liberal he most hates in the world.
The seriousness of Johnson’s shame should not escape us, even as we’ve become used to it. He is the first prime minister to have been found lying to parliament in this way. He did so knowingly, and it was an unusually bold and callous lie.
In doing so, he has further undermined the public’s faith in parliamentary democracy. He’s also damaged the chances of future public health restrictions being effective. There is some poignancy in the fact of the big lockdown lie being confirmed just as the Covid-19 inquiry gets under way. The timing reminds us of the abject hypocrisy of it all – the way that Johnson and those around him would secretly party away and mix freely at social gatherings, denied to the rest of the country. If they did nothing wrong, why didn’t they tell us how much they were enjoying themselves at the time?
Johnson wrote the rules – or at least approved them – and appeared on television earnestly urging us to follow them for the sake of our loved ones and the NHS. Cameras off, he then slunk back and presided over a culture of rule-breaking in Downing Street. He acquiesced in the antics and was happy to see everyone else fined for disobedience, even as people were unable to see dying relatives and enduring lockdown funerals.
One rule for them and other for us. We locked down, he ignored the rules in Downing Street and at Chequers. Johnson’s big lockdown lie is sufficient to disqualify him from any public office for the rest of his life. Now is the time for the rest of us to move on.
