Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Welcome to Messminster, where ministers can get away with whatever they fancy

What do you need to do to get sacked in this place? Quite a lot, according to the response from Downing Street to the two rows in Westminster today. First, there’s Boris Johnson, refusing to apologise in the Commons for his blunder last week about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. When asked about why Johnson hadn’t said sorry for the distress his mistake had caused, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman argued that the important thing was that ‘the clarity that the Foreign Secretary provided today was clearly helpful, it has been welcomed and the Iranians are in no doubt as to what our view is’. He repeated the point about clarity being the most important thing in response to a number of different questions about whether Boris Johnson was doing his job properly, including when asked whether it mattered that Johnson wasn’t right first time, and whether this now meant that it didn’t really matter if ministers pitched up before other committees and made similarly dangerous remarks, so long as they clarified them at some point.

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