The Commons privileges committee report into the conduct of Boris Johnson is completely damning. All the kerfuffle about whether the committee was justified in devising a new intermediate category of mendacity defined as ‘recklessly misleading parliament’ turns out to be irrelevant.
The entire seven-strong committee, including the four Tory members on it, have found that Johnson deliberately misled parliament on multiple fronts. Johnson’s dissembling and purveying of falsehoods while prime minister is judged so serious that, had the blond bombshell hung around to take his punishment, the committee’s recommendation would have been a suspension from the Commons ‘long enough to engage the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act’.
We have had our use out of Johnson just as he has had his use out of us
He spectacularly departed from the Commons on Friday immediately after he saw a confidential draft of the report – denouncing the committee as a ‘kangaroo court’ as he went. This can now be seen as a cunning pre-emptive strike designed to ensure that most of his remaining cult followers keep the faith.
But the committee has not taken this ruse well. It said it views it as containing ‘further contempts’ and says it would have recommended a suspension of 90 days in part because of these further attempts ‘to undermine the parliamentary process’.
Its core finding is that Johnson had ‘personal knowledge’ of lockdown-breaching gatherings in Downing Street. The Committee found he withheld this from the Commons when repeatedly giving false assurances that rules and guidance had been followed at all times.
Those of us who have been prepared to weigh Johnson’s penchant for bluster and slapdashery in the balance alongside his many talents and merits – rather than regarding it as an altogether disabling trait – must now make a forced choice. Either we accept the basic findings of a highly detailed inquiry conducted by a cross-party committee of MPs or we must indulge in a full-on conspiracy theory which takes as its pretext the idea that Johnson and Johnson alone is the true keeper of the Brexit flame. It then follows that ‘the establishment’ has decided to get rid of him in revenge and as the first step in a plot to get the UK back into the EU.
I’m going for the former option and invite fellow Brexiteers to do the same. Do we really want our great cause suborned into a tiny mission to keep alive the political career of a man who rode on its back to a parliamentary majority of 80 and who then went on to egregiously flunk the opportunities thus provided largely because of his own character flaws?
It’s a no from me. To be blunt and perhaps equally as brutal as the Privileges Committee: we have had our use out of Johnson just as he has had his use out of us. It is time to check out of the Boris Johnson Show. He may have opted to try and become the ‘Britain Trump’, but we don’t have to follow him down that path.
Yes, there are some valid questions to be asked regarding potential conflicts of interest or humbug surrounding Harriet Harman and Sir Bernard Jenkin. And yes, a lot of MPs are inclined to believe the worst of Boris Johnson.
But are we to accept that he is too notorious ever to get a fair political trial? Must he therefore be exempted from ‘the network of obligation that binds everyone else’? Are we compelled to back his habit of ‘appearing affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility’? Well, hardly. Those last two quotes by the way are drawn from a letter written by his classics master at Eton College to his father some 41 years ago.
When Boris Johnson became prime minister after Theresa May’s ignominious failure, the political context called for someone with chutzpah and flair: a rule-bender who understood that the ends justified the means when it came to ensuring that a core democratic decision was implemented. He was that leader. When Covid descended, the imposition of lockdowns called for someone with almost super-human powers of self-discipline and restraint who could set an example. The late Queen Elizabeth II was that leader and Boris Johnson was very much not.
Paul Simon once sang about a man who didn’t want to ‘end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard’. That, alas, is where the giant persona of Johnson appears to be transporting itself. You can call him Boris, but it’s time for most of us to call him Al.
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