Politics: the wrong kind of lies

By Richard North - March 23, 2023

Somehow, I managed to convince myself that the spectacle of an ex-prime minister being tried by his peers for lying was important enough for me to invest my time in watching him perform … if only because I can then claim that I was there at the end.

As I sat down to write, Ollie the parrot was duly installed as my supervisor. As he is really into polly-ticks, he reminded me that, at heart he is a Tory supporter: he always insists on sitting on my right shoulder. Should I switch him to the left, he squawks indignantly and shuffles behind my neck until he has resumed his rightful place.

But even Ollie, who watched with untypical silence some of the televised performance, can’t be much help to the Oaf, who had spent the best part of three hours on self-immolation when, had this been a US hearing, his best tactic might have been to plead the fifth.

It’s not that he actually incriminated himself though, by admitting that he had lied “deliberately” or “recklessly”. Simply, in a Jesuitical turn of phrase, he argued that he could not possibly have been lying as he was totally unaware that any breaches of the rules had occurred.

To lie, of course, he had to know he was lying and, since he didn’t, he wasn’t. Boris the liar had inadvertently misled parliament, more Nelsonian than Churchillian, standing on the fo’c’sle, telescope wedged firmly to his blind eye, declaring: “I see no parties”.

This convenient state of unknowing, he averred, came about because none of the many advisors around him had told him anything – presumably in flaming letters of fire, ten feet high on the Downing Street lawn. If any of the rules so diligently followed by the rest of the nation – on his advice – had actually been broken at No 10, there was no way Johnson could have known.

Being prime minister, Johnson’s case was that he was entitled to rely on what his advisors told him, and if they told him nothing, he knew nothing. That’s the way, the Oaf angrily averred, government works.

This is a man, incidentally, who has ambitions of being cast in the Churchillian mould. Yet the wartime prime minister, all too aware that he was not always getting the full picture from his closest advisors, used to call in people from the sharp end, to give him a horse’s mouth view of the war.

Nowhere, in Johnson’s lengthy and at times irritable – and always tedious – defence of himself, did one gain the impression that this was the captain of the ship, master of all he commanded, with his finger on the pulse knowing all that was going on. Far from being omniscient, without his advisors, he was but a helpless pawn, helpless and ignorant. And because of this, he could not be blamed – for anything.

In coming to such a conclusion, I carefully avoided absorbing, or coming into contact with the torrent or opinion freely on offer – except from Ollie, of course. Otherwise, anything I might write simply becomes an echo-chamber, reflecting those views which seem most attractive to me.

Nonetheless, as one might expect, my first port of call was John Crace, whose take was not a million miles from the Daily Star yesterday.

Under the headline, “Impervious to advice or rules, Johnson held up the shield of stupidity”, Crace argues that the “Convict” ignored his well-paid legal team to mount a defence blind to logic.

This was his “stupidity theme”. Writes Crace, “he genuinely believed that no rules had been broken because no one had told him any rules were being broken. He wasn’t responsible for his own actions”. Interestingly, The Times took the same view, its writers concluding: “His defence is he’s an idiot”.

This is not even a case of great minds think alike. No great mind was required to discern Johnson’s line of defence. It’s the first time he’s been transparent in his life – transparently stupid.

One thing Crace doesn’t mention, though, is the other great drama that was developing, off-screen, with proceedings suspended while MPs voted for Sunak’s W[T]F plan for Northern Ireland. In other major success of the day, Johnson led the rebellion, turning out 22 Tories (including himself).

All in all, he delivered a stunning rebuke to the current prime minister, who had to be content with the slender outcome of 515 votes to 29 – a perilously thin majority of 486.

With Mark Francois, chairman of the ERG describing the “Stormont brake” as “practically useless”, Westminster signalled the prevailing sentiment: “Nobody cares!”. Nevertheless, the hyper-intelligent Rees-Mogg thinks “Boris Johnson won today in the court of public opinion”.

As before, the Telegraph uses Camilla Tominey to put the boot in. Her online headline is “The cult of Boris Johnson – and his Brexit dream – are imploding”.

This somehow gets translated in the print edition to “The cults of Boris and Brexit are simultaneously exploding”, mysteriously elevated to the front page. If it’s any consolation to Johnson, this tops a piece which declares: “Arrest could be fun. Trump tells his friends”. Believe me, it isn’t.

Anyhow, the Tominey person has it that Brexit’s “poster boy” is struggling to take control over his own political future – assuming he has one. She reminds us that it is nearly 30 years since the great Maastricht rebellion, and although the rebels also lost that fight, one cannot help but feel that the cause is running out of steam.

Tominey writes that, as the long-standing Tory MP for Harwich and North Colchester grilled the former prime minister on whether or not he had lied to Parliament over partygate, “the distant sound of a fat lady singing could be heard slowly permeating through the corridors of power”.

“Big Dog” was once able to galvanise enough backbench support to bring down Theresa May and her Chequers deal, she adds. But as he spent the afternoon reduced to the role of unruly bulldog, refusing to be brought to heel by Harriet Harman, who chairs the committee, not even his old Vote Leave comrades appeared willing to throw him a bone.

The Boris Brexit bus hadn’t just broken down, Tominey mused – it appeared a write-off. “And while it has always been argued that one should never write off the man who twice won London, along with an 80-seat Tory majority, the car crash that unfolded in the Grimond Room suggests the end of the road may well have been reached”, she concluded.

Although many of us would want to see a stake through the heart, with the carcass buried in a casket stuffed with garlic, topped by a lake of holy water, guarded by machine gunners armed with silver bullets, what may really signal that the game is over is the calibre of Johnson’s remaining supporters.

One of the most voluble in the media is a man called Dan Wootton, a denizen of GB News, who is also writing for the Mailonline. And, according to young Wootton, “Westminster’s crooked kangaroo court tried its hardest, but failed to produce any smoking gun against Boris Johnson”. In his view, “This deranged witch hunt must now fail for the sake of British democracy”.

The judge, jury and executioners on the Privileges Committee in Westminster’s Grimond Room – led by Labour’s Boris hater-in-chief Harriet Harman, who decided on a guilty verdict months ago before seeing a scrap of evidence – proved even more of a kangaroo court than I feared was possible, he writes.

This same man writes in GB News of it being a “deep state stitch up” of Boris Johnson, which tells you much of what you need to know about Wootton.

However, on the 20th anniversary of Blair’s war in Iraq, I would be far from alone if I observed that we never saw a show trial in parliament, challenging Tony on the lies he so casually trotted out. Perhaps the Oaf’s problem is that he tells the wrong kind of lies.