Truth lies uneasily around BoJo’s No10 party claims
EVER been to a party so wild that you are still not sure if it really happened?
You know the sort of crazy, non-descript night I mean, don’t you? Cheese, nibbles, and someone called Allegra – held in the highest office of a powerful Western democracy.
Not exactly the kind of latenight antics that would easily escape your mind if asked about it at a later date.
Yet we are now to believe Boris Johnson that no such shindig occurred in Downing Street, but also that if it did (which it didn’t) then all the necessary rules around having parties in lockdown (which were against the law) were followed.
Confused? You will be. And so, as the Prime Minister hastily announced England’s Plan B – which is basically Plan A in the other home nations – we were plunged into the latest bizarre scenario where millions will imminently be placed under a raft of restrictions the Government itself has not only failed to follow but has demonstrated a sneering contempt in the face of.
Aware that what I am about to say may see me sectioned under the Mental Health Act, the one-ina-billion chance that Johnson is actually telling the truth – that he really didn’t know about the party – must be considered as a possibility.
Of course, the probability he is telling the truth falls dramatically when you consider one other vital detail. That being the small fact that the man lies about almost everything. If Johnson detects even the slightest possibility that he can get away with being dishonest he will take it. The Prime Minister is so frequently dishonest that he has become utterly desensitised to the acute discomfort a morally normal person experiences when they tell a porky-pie.
When lying is pathological and bluster and hyperbole are your primary means of communication, rapid-fire fibs, dispensed as a matter of instinct, become as natural as breathing.
In every role Johnson has held, whether as a father, a partner, a professional or a public official, he has exhibited this special skill for duplicity.
Sadly, in Britain’s topsy-turvy class-system, where merit is defined according to the advantages and interests of the powerful, Boris’s blatant selfinterest and ruthless win-by-anymeans-necessary attitude are seen by many, not as defects of character, but as talents worth celebrating.
Johnson remains immensely useful because his skill set, as unpolished and cavalier as it may appear, is matched perfectly to the political challenges arising in a country where people care less and less about what’s true.
What matters today is getting one over on the other side.
It will only be when the people around him (that he currently regards as loyal) determine that keeping Johnson in No10 may soon hand the advantage back to the other side that he will be quickly deposed.