Several years ago, the joke doing the rounds was: ‘How do you know Boris Johnson is lying?’ Answer: ‘His lips move’. Recent history validates this characterisation. Johnson repeatedly makes statements contradicted by verifiable facts. Yet, in the face of glaring discrepancies, he seems incapable of confronting himself with his lies.
Johnson’s conduct shows that he feels immune from the laws, rules, or conventions by which other UK citizens are obliged to live. By definition, he never thinks of himself as guilty of wrongdoing. This self-serving logic means denying a wrongdoing can never amount to a lie either, much less require a sincere apology. Johnson has the personal accountability of a three-year-old whose constant refrain is ‘Wasn’t me, Dad’.
Lying: a virus that’s contaminating politics
Having this kind of example at the very top of government is leading to a very dangerous development: Johnson’s constant lying and the acceptance of it by senior members of the Tory Party is normalising lies as the legitimate way of conducting politics.
Number 10 Downing Street is a particularly dangerous place in which to be, contaminated as it is with high concentrations of lying virus everywhere. It causes ministers and people close to the prime minister to repeat or defend Johnson’s lies in the media. But if Tory MPs spread the self-serving and morally bankrupt idea that the public have ‘baked his lying’ into the price of his leadership, they conspire in the lies and contribute to the damage Johnson wreaks on the country’s standing, our democracy, our institutions, the rule of law and our hard-won freedoms.
Culling the fall guys won’t work
Sadly, no vaccine is available for this particular virus. But Johnson is trying to persuade us that a major culling of personnel will do the job, akin to the incineration of cattle in response to the outbreak of mad cow disease. Thus, his first response when he sensed public disapproval was to look around for acolytes who have had the misfortune to work within an unsafe social distance of him. He declared he’d jettison them in a purging process based, it seems, on his own version of a positive LFT (lying fall-guy test?). Expert advice to cull the Big Bull super-spreader himself has predictably been ignored by the PM.
Summary justice is fit for civil servants, but not it seems for the PM himself. If Tory ministers, party members and supporters accept this as a solution, they stand guilty of spreading what is already a highly contagious virus.
“We got the big calls right” – really?
Senior members of the Tory party now argue for taking no action against Johnson on the grounds he “got the big calls right” on covid.
Ah yes. They’d be the calls that included:
- The UK having the largest cumulative number of deaths amongst comparable European countries.
- Elderly or vulnerable infectious people being transferred from hospitals into care homes, both spreading the disease and causing unnecessary deaths.
- Johnson’s call that the bodies should “be allowed to pile up in their thousands” rather than go into a third lockdown.
- The £10bn write-off of unusable protective equipment (PPE) recently announced.
- Johnson claiming credit for the vaccine roll-out when it was a collective effort by the NHS, vaccine researchers and producers, scientific advisers, and those who produced the vaccine in unprecedented time scales at the outset.
- Johnson overriding the science to follow his ill-disguised attachment to a herd immunity strategy, then being forced to U-turn and impose new covid regulations as deaths rose.
- The awarding of non-competitive contracts to crony contacts deemed illegal last month.
Feeble excuses from ministers
In a TV interview with Kay Burley of Sky News on 1 Feb 2022, Dominic Raab suggested the office of government and the civil service administration at Number 10 have become blurred, implying Johnson has been the unfortunate victim of an alien mist that descended on Number 10 and obscured what was happening under his own roof.
Jacobs Rees-Mogg excelled himself recently by suggesting our judgment of Johnson’s #partygate lies should be based not on covid regulations at the time but an assessment in hindsight of whether those rules were reasonable and proportionate. Retrospective absolution could be a new legal construct, perhaps to be known as ‘off the hook sentencing’ or ‘Johnson’s law’.
However, after their initial disdain for the wearing of masks in parliament, large numbers of Tory MPs have recently taken to them. Perhaps it’s because they offer a degree of personal protection against the news media catching you grimacing or laughing behind your mask as your hapless leader digs himself deeper into a hole.
Those Tory ministers and MPs who do continue to advocate living with the Johnson virus because their own careers will be better advanced by turning a blind eye and a deaf ear, will preside over a decline in standards of government from which they can never absolve themselves and from which our politics might take years to recover.
Members of the public have made up their minds
We don’t need enquiries from Sue Gray or the Metropolitan Police to tell us what happened. Nor, having been aware of the rules, which the vast majority of law-abiding citizens upheld, do we need an authoritative, not-so-independent judgment about whether Johnson had broken his own regulations. The enquiry approach is akin to an official review of yesterday’s weather as if confirmation were needed that we all got soaked. We were all there to experience it for ourselves.
We all need to protect ourselves against the lying virus and exercise our personal responsibility to ensure Johnson goes into a lifetime of self-isolation. If ever there was a patriotic cause calling for the country to unify, this is it. Failing this, expect the lying virus to produce variants against which we will have declining levels of protection.
Vaccines aren’t available. Overcoming the lying virus requires the surgical removal of the main spreader. To increase the chances of that happening, the millions of people who are enraged, disenchanted or horrified by Johnson’s lies should continue to let their MP know how they still feel, especially those in Tory constituencies. Otherwise, at least until the next general election, the lying virus will infect every aspect of our lives.
