Boris Johnson didn’t enjoy his two hours in front of the Liaison Committee this afternoon, and not just because he was asked repeatedly about his handling of the Tory sleaze row. He also struggled with questions about what his government was up to more generally, and appeared at times exasperated with the select committee chairs who asked them. Having spent the past couple of months riffing on Kermit the Frog’s mantra that ‘it’s not that easy being green’, it seemed Johnson was starting to realise that it’s also not that easy being Prime Minister. There is just so much to do, after all.
Perhaps his workload was the reason Johnson was, in his words, ‘mistaken’ in his approach to the Owen Paterson case
Perhaps his workload was the reason Johnson was, in his words, ‘mistaken’ in his approach to the Owen Paterson case. He faced questions on this from several of the chairs on the committee, and grew increasingly irritated by their insistence on asking him more and more about the issue. He told Chris Bryant that he ‘may well have been mistaken’ in his initial understanding that Paterson hadn’t broken the rules and that it was ‘certainly the impression that many people seem to have had’ that the North Shropshire MP had been mistreated by the standards regime. It’s almost as if Johnson had relied too heavily on the arguments of Paterson and his friends, rather than the detailed report on his conduct: MPs who started out sympathetic to their Paterson found changed their mind totally upon reading.
By the time Home Affairs Committee chair Yvette Cooper asked her questions, Johnson was in a bad mood. She put it to him that he had a ‘responsibility to go above and beyond’ obeying the rules because he was Prime Minister, and that this included things such as wearing a mask in hospital. This was a reference to recent stories that Johnson had been repeatedly asked to put a mask on when he was visiting Hexham Hospital, and the Prime Minister rather bitterly responded that ‘as for not wearing a mask in Hexham Hospital which you wrap up into my general litany of crime… there was barely 30 seconds when I was not wearing one… I apologise for it but most pictures of my visit to the hospital will show I was duly masked’.
He was visibly uncomfortable when answering Caroline Nokes’s questions, in part perhaps because the chair of the Women and Equalities Committee had this week alleged that the Prime Minister’s father had touched her inappropriately at a party conference in 2003. Then he found himself mired in confusion over whether he had misled voters on miners’ pensions, before clashing noisily with Defence Committee chair Tobias Ellwood on tanks and struggling to understand an entirely predictable question from Health Select Committee chair Jeremy Hunt about a longstanding campaign he has for independent estimates of the number of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers that the NHS will need in future.
He also dodged questions from Treasury Select Committee chair Mel Stride about the prospect of a ‘wage/price spiral that could have devastating consequences for the public finances’, arguing that Stride was exaggerating the influence of government on whether workers received pay rises. His answers didn’t just suggest that Johnson doesn’t fully have a grip on the different responsibilities of his government, but also that he was a bit surprised that he was being asked about them at all.
Comments