The thing I find most unbelievable about the latest Partygate story is not that Boris Johnson was at Lee Cain’s leaving do, but that he actually poured drinks for others. This is not the man we know. He is famously tight and buys no one else a drink ever so I can only imagine this booze was paid for by some benefactor or us, the little people who pay tax and stuck to the Covid rules he made.
The question is not whether Johnson lies; this is known and documented. It is now about how much significance we attach to the fact he lied to parliament. Some people care very much about his breaking of lockdown restrictions, particularly if they have been affected directly by Covid, but many do not. They had a cheeky barbecue or a small dinner or broke the rules in tiny ways themselves. Sure, many say, he is flawed. Only human after all, but the one thing all polls show is that the word most associated with him is ‘liar’.
We have all met charming liars. We all know what happens when the charm wears thin.
In her 2010 book Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception, author Pamela Meyer makes this crucial point: “Lying is a co-operative act… A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie”.
This is the situation that the House of Commons faces, as MPs return from recess today and Johnson makes a statement over his Partygate fine. Doubtless he will blather on about mistakes being made, about No 10 being both home and workplace and his disgruntled cabinet will perform the whole “Let’s draw a line under this. There are bigger things to think about” pantomime.
Indeed, there are, but the constitutional experts are not wrong to tell us that a fundamental pact is being broken, that we cannot have a lawbreaker in power, one that holds parliament in contempt. If the credibility of this institution is undermined, our system of democracy is being put in the shredder, in front of our eyes.
And what is it all for? What do this upper caste of Tories believe in, beyond power for its own sake? Margaret Thatcher, as much I opposed her, stood for something and had a vision of the country that was divisive but coherent. This lot live in some moral vacuum, so it is hardly surprising that they have to be reminded of basic humanity by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who used his Easter Sunday address to criticise the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, and was immediately accused of “misguided moralising.”
I have no faith so I do not pretend to know what is opposite to “the nature of God”, but if the job of religious leader is not to moralise then I am not quite sure what it is. The dead cat of the Rwandan deal is as heartless as it is patently unworkable: Priti Patel was warned by her own permanent secretary that there was no evidence that this policy would even work as a deterrent, never mind provide value for money.
The world is on the move, as a result of both climate change and, as we see in Ukraine, war. Countries may close their borders but the specific problem of desperate people coming here on dinghies from France is not completely insoluble.
I am hardly Detective Inspector Clouseau but even I could spot the people smugglers circling the camps in Calais and Dunkirk. The refugees know who they are and are terrified of them. An international effort is required to smash those gangs who operate all along the routes these people come from, through Syria, Eritrea or Afghanistan.
Johnson may cosplay some version of Churchill by going walkabout with Zelensky, but he cannot be saved by this terrible war.
If the problem for the Conservative Party is that there is no viable challenger then we must ask how we have ended up with a kind of feudal system where even basic integrity is so completely lacking. The Tory brand, which rests on law and order, upholding tradition and respect for the institutions of the establishment, is visibly crumbling with no viable alternative offered.
Johnson is out to save his own skin and, devoid of any sense of honour, he will probably dissemble enough to do it. His MPs will tolerate the lying, for their power rests on it. In the end, perhaps so will much of the country – who are more concerned about horrific gas bills than constitutional matters – but this is truly a shameful spectacle.
We look down on dictatorships with leaders who dare not tell the truth, but live in parallel universes of their own making . Or we used to. There was a notion of accountability: our elected representatives are accountable to parliament and therefore ultimately to us, the people.
As the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn said of the Soviet Union “In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state”.
Is this now true of our country? We shall see.
