Politics: the birthday boy has a party

By Richard North - January 25, 2022

I made a serious mistake yesterday. Concentrating as I was on Ukraine and the international situation, all I took in from the revered prime minister of the United Kingdom was his warning to Russia that invading Ukraine would be “disastrous” and a “painful, violent and bloody business”.

Furthermore, Johnson said the UK was “leading on creating a package of economic sanctions” against Russia and was supplying defensive weaponry to Ukraine – thereby staking his claim as a front-runner in the statesman stakes, standing up to bully-boy Putin.

This I thought, was a good move – politically speaking. If, as I rather suspect might be the case, Putin is as good as his word and has no intention of invading Ukraine, then Johnson comes out of this looking rather statesmanlike.

Since most people, fed on the media narrative, don’t actually believe Putin, in the fullness of time, he can position himself as the man who saved the day, standing up to the Russian tyrant. In due course, the grateful Ukrainians will award him a medal and everybody lives to fight another day.

And that’s where I went wrong. In between the media stories about Russia invading Chernobyl – on their way to Kiev from the border with Belarus, presumably their tanks glowing in the dark by the time they arrived – the prime minister was very far from basking in the glow of a newly-minted international stateman.

For the moment, we won’t ask any embarrassing questions, like how The Sun believes that the Russian forces can sustain no less than nine thrust lines, plus an airborne drop, with a mere 100,000 troops. It is, after all, only blogs and social media that deliver fake news.

Nor indeed will we ask why the paper thinks it appropriate to send us to an “all-Aussie” news website which shows us a photo of a BM-27 Uragan system on its Zil-135 launch vehicle.

After all, why should we have any concerns about seeing a 1975 weapons system, on its original 1958 transport (produced with a five-year service life, with production ceasing in the 1980s), represented as part of the Russian forces being sent to Belarus (presumably to invade Chernobyl)? Just because I’ve seen newer kit in a museum don’t mean nothing.

Instead, we shall concentrate on the main event, courtesy of ITN’s Robert Peston who tells us that Johnson has just had “a day from hell”, “the worst day for a prime minister that I can remember for a significant time”, he says.

And it’s there, quite obviously, that I’ve made my mistake. There I was thinking that Johnson had had a good day, bigging himself up as a robust international statesman when, after all, he was having a “day from hell”. Clearly, I blinked and I missed it.

For all that, I really don’t want to rehearse all Johnson’s woes, which bring to the word “tedious” a new and extended meaning. Suffice to say that what puts the icing on the cake (quite literally, it seems), is that the prime minister is alleged to have had a birthday party during the first lockdown in 2020 despite the rules forbidding social gatherings indoors at the time.

It is also alleged that his then girlfriend, Miss Carrie, helped organise the “surprise get-together” for him on the afternoon of 19 June just after 2pm. Up to 30 people are said to have attended the event in the Cabinet Room after Johnson had returned from an official visit to a school in Hertfordshire, one of the guests being interior designer, Lulu Lytle, who was not a member of No 10 staff.

Miss Carrie and Lulu Lytle are believed to have presented the prime minister with a cake whilst his paramour led staff in a chorus of happy birthday. Then, ITV News tells us that it “understands” that, on the evening of 19 June 2020, family friends were hosted upstairs in the prime minister’s residence in an apparent further breach of the Covid rules.

I suppose one might concede that it is marginally more interesting than a picture of a BM-27 system on the back of a geriatric Zil-135, if for no other reasons than the political implications.

As ITN kindly reminds us, on 13 June, 2020, six days before Johnson’s birthday bash, the Queen watched a scaled back ceremony for her official birthday on her own, without family by her side. She viewed the annual Trooping the Colour parade from behind the walls of Windsor Castle, with none of it on public view, while the parade was conducted adhering to the strict two metre government guidelines on social distancing at the time.

Clearly, The Times seems to think this recently disclosed example of “cakeism” is quite interesting. It has put the story on its front page, with the headline, “Boris Johnson held lockdown birthday party at No 10”.

To add piquancy to the story, it seems that it was a “union jack” cake and we are treated to a montage of Johnson with a different cake, photoshopped onto a backdrop of the famous No 10 door (illustrated). The minor event of the prime minister holding “crisis talks” with his European counterparts, the United States and Nato over Ukraine is relegated to a sidebar.

But then, just about the entire media collective seems to think the “birthday party” story is more important than a picture of a BM-27 system on the back of a geriatric Zil-135, supposedly on its way to Belarus. Even the seriously compromised Sun has taken time out from the invasion of Chernobyl, to put the (non-union-jack) cake on the front page, with the inevitable headline: “You can’t have your birthday cake … and eat it, Boris”.

Nevertheless, we get to know that No10 “insists” (a word used by the media when they don’t believe what they are being told) that the PM was there for “less than ten minutes” after staff had “gathered briefly” after a meeting.

“Boris-defending” Culture Secretary and slayer of the BBC, Nadine Dorries, also gets to “hit out”, saying: “So, when people in an office buy a cake in the middle of the afternoon for someone else they are working in the office with and stop for ten minutes to sing happy birthday and then go back to their desks, this is now called a party?”

Nothing could qualify as a “day from hell”, though, without an intervention from the Prince of Darkness himself, Dominic Cummings. Thus, The Sun gives him a walk-on part, to warn that there will be fresh revelations imminently, and that “officials” in Whitehall are actively engaged in a plot to overthrow the PM this week. In what is described as “a menacing tweet”, he tells Tory MPs they must dump the PM “if they want the nightmare to end”.

And “nightmare” it is, especially when the Telegraph helpfully runs the story with a twist of its own. Three months before his own party, it seems, Johnson wrote a letter praising a girl called Josephine for cancelling her birthday party due to coronavirus guidance.

Just to ram the point home (or twist the knife), the paper publishes a facsimile of the letter, written in Johnson’s own execrable handwriting, reminding “Josephine” that he regularly washes his hands with soap and water for 20 seconds, “the time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice”.

With Johnson also tweeting on 21 March 2020: “Josephine sets a great example to us all by postponing her birthday party until we have sent coronavirus packing”, the prime minister is no doubt wishing he could wash his hands of this story, without needing to sing a little song.

As for the PBI in the snowy trenches of Ukraine, to say nothing of Vladimir from Moscow, they are probably wondering why the “prime minister of England” is being taken apart for eating a cake on his birthday. But then, having your cake and eating it has a special resonance in British politics.

One wouldn’t expect excitable foreigners to understand.