It is entirely understandable that Boris Johnson should want to take a drink with friends and workmates at the end of the day. It is what we all like to do. It is entirely understandable that he should want to make his own judgment about the risk of spreading Covid-19 among the population of Number 10. Probably there was no risk at all. What Johnson did was only human. The problem is that it was a humanity that he denied to everyone else.
The lockdown was a sustained assault on our humanity. First, it was an attack on our instincts as social animals. Interaction with other human beings is not just an agreeable leisure activity. It is fundamental to our culture, our social organisation and our economy. It is essential to our mental health and general wellbeing. It is the source of our creativity. It is the basis almost everything that we do.
Secondly, the lockdown was a denial of our autonomy. We make our own judgments about our lives, our health and all the risks which are inseparable from existence. Of course, we make them within a framework of laws designed to enable us to live in society, at peace with our neighbours. But there are some basic freedoms which the law can only take away by transforming us into robotic tools of the state. We are made for better things than that.
Some of the worst features of the lockdown regulations were due to the very fact that they were so offensive to human nature and therefore so hard to enforce. They had to be indiscriminate, because discriminating between high risk and low-risk activities would have been impractical at street level. They had to impose exorbitant and disproportionate fines because the difficulty of catching lawbreakers meant that horrible examples had to be made of the few who were found out. They had to be accompanied by unbalanced and hysterical government messaging so as to frighten people into voluntary compliance.
Partygate has united two groups, previously at loggerheads, in a common chorus of disgust. There are those who believe that coercion was absolutely necessary in the face of the pandemic, and are outraged by the Prime Minister’s failure to comply. And there are those who believe that the Downing Street parties have exposed what was offensive about the attempt to control the spread of an endemic disease by micromanaging an entire population with menaces and threats.
The second group, who are becoming more numerous by the day, will find a certain satisfaction in the spectacle of the Prime Minister caught up in the legal tangle that he devised for the rest of us. He has told us in his half-hearted apology that it never occurred to him that what he did was illegal. That says it all. In a humane world, it would not have been illegal. In an honourable world, there would have been no need for apology because compliance would have been a matter of course.
It would be odd to get rid of a Prime Minister simply because there were too many boozy parties in Downing Street. But that has never been the essence of the charge against Boris Johnson. The important thing is what Partygate tells us about his values, for we will have to live with those for as long as he remains in office. How did a self-professed liberal come to abandon his principles so quickly and with so little attention to the detail or the consequences? How did he come to make solemn statements in Parliament about his own actions which are so palpably untrue? Can we, as a nation, look back on this sorry catalogue of evasions, expedients and half-truths, and pretend that honour and integrity still lie at the heart of our politics?
