Labour MPs and parts of the media are currently exploring, as part of the partygate scandal, whether if you repeat often enough that someone has lied, you can make that an accepted fact, even if you do not have a shred of evidence or reason to believe it. The latest example came in the Commons this week when MPs referred Boris Johnson to the privileges committee for potentially misleading parliament.
The problem is that Boris Johnson did not lie about having received birthday greetings from work colleagues between work meetings. His team literally briefed the event to the press on the day it occurred. In June 2020, during the height of lockdown, the Times reported that Boris Johnson had received a cake for his birthday. No one noticed. Boris also did not lie about having given a work speech to colleagues in his garden. How could he possibly pretend such an event did not occur?
Manifestly, Boris believed at the time that these events – along with all the others he attended – were within the rules. For some of them the official Downing Street photographer took pictures. Others were briefed to the press. For others emails were sent or they were recorded on Zoom. It is blatantly obvious that Johnson believed they were within the rules.
Now, perhaps he was wrong about that. But, if so, that is not because he didn’t know what the rules were. If Cristiano Ronaldo is passed the ball, outsprints the defence and puts the ball in the net, but VAR lines later show he was offside by millimetres, that doesn’t mean that Ronaldo doesn’t know the rules of football when he celebrated with the crowd or that he was lying. It means Ronaldo’s understanding of what he’d done didn’t match what actually happened. Perhaps having cake between work meetings was not a normal part of work, but that doesn’t mean that this was obvious to Boris – or that he hadn’t understood you weren’t allowed to meet with people other than for things that were part of work.
To be sure, the Met have issued him a Fixed Penalty Notice and will presumably issue him more. But all that that means is that the Met believe Boris has committed an offence. In Britain, being accused by the police of an offence doesn’t mean you committed one.
During the years of lockdown restrictions, many people were presumably given birthday greetings or birthday cake by work colleagues whilst genuinely at work. Yet it appears that not a single other such event, beside Boris Johnson’s, has resulted in fines. Think of that. Out of more than 100,000 fixed penalty notices, not a single other one appears to have been over birthday cake at work. It really does appear to be one rule for Boris and one rule for everyone else.
Keir Starmer tells us mawkish stories of people being unable to visit dying friends or relatives. But Boris Johnson isn’t accused of visiting his friends or relatives. No one thinks he did that at all. So when Starmer says people couldn’t visit their sick loved ones that’s true – and Boris couldn’t either, and didn’t.
Labour knows perfectly well that Boris will have believed what he did at the time was within the rules and that what he did created no risk of additional spread. (How could it, given that he gathered only with people he worked with?) But Labour MPs such as Barry Gardiner attended the lockdown-breaking BLM protests in 2020. And Starmer cheered on these protests – and was even pictured taking the knee himself. Tens of thousands of non-socially-distanced people gathered for non-work purposes, facilitating countless extra coronavirus cases. Because they didn’t feel the rules applied to them. And Starmer cheered them on.
Lying isn’t merely being mistaken – especially when there is every reason to believe you genuinely believed yourself correct at the time, as Boris clearly did for the events focused on so far. Perhaps some additional event might yet trouble him. If the so-called ‘Abba party’, when his wife supposedly celebrated Dominic Cummings’s downfall, is as billed, Boris could yet have a problem.
But for the other events, it is clear that Johnson will have believed at the time that they were within both the letter and spirit of the rules, presenting no risk of spreading the disease. He may even have been advised by senior civil servants that they were permitted.
So all Labour have is repetition and mawkishness. ‘He lied. He lied. People’s loved one’s died.’ They think that if they say it enough times they will make it so. Maybe that will work in the end – but politics is diminished when such tactics are permitted to succeed.
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