If you’re tempted to think Boris a charlatan

POOR Mr Johnson, he’s had a rough few weeks, really.

It has been hard to hear anyone believe him or forgive him after the latest allegations, except for a small handful of Conservative MPs.

Recently in his Times column, former Conservative MP Matthew Parris called him a “charlatan” and a “sham”. Not the fondest description of anyone, let alone the leader of a country.

I would like to bring a bit of balance to this, so let’s see the world from the Prime Minister’s point of view.

He’s got a big job, involving making lots of laws. You cannot expect him to remember them all, can you?

That is what I first thought when I heard this week about the Downing Street gathering on Wednesday, May 20, 2020.

Then, when he remembered that he had attended, it turned out that he thought it was a work meeting.

An easy mistake to make and, of course, it meant that his own rule about only meeting one person outside was not relevant: as a work affair it was therefore okay to invite 100 people.

I imagine that he attends a lot of evening work meetings at Downing Street where people are encouraged to take alcohol. In fact, I must admit to being a little jealous. If anyone had been caught drinking alcohol at a work meeting it would have been a disciplinary offence.

He is a man of great integrity, as I heard a Conservative MP reassure us (okay, if you want to be pernickety, there were two unfortunate incidents where he was sacked for lying).

So if he says it was a meeting, it was. We are certain, therefore, to see the agenda to which they worked when the investigator tells us about it.

So you’re not yet convinced that this was all above board?

Well, what about his personal circumstances? His sixth child, Wilfred, was born on April 29, 2020, just three weeks before the meeting that was not a party.

Any new modern dad will sympathise with him: anxiety about being a parent, sleepless nights, nappy changing, amusing the new human being.

It has an impact on the ability to think clearly, so maybe his antennae were not working when he believed that it was a meeting.

You might say that he should have known about parenting, given that he already had Lara, Milo, Cassia, Theodore and Stephanie.

That is true, but times were different then and he did not have to try and get by on just his Prime Minister’s salary of £150,000: obviously another thing to worry about, along with leading the country.

It was, he has admitted, simply not enough to live on as well as pay for Wilfred’s nanny and get Downing Street properly decorated.

He also had a few personal difficulties with some of the mothers of the children, so perhaps was not able to learn about and practise parental duties as he would have liked.

So there you are, a man of high principles but weighed down by the demands of high public office and of being a responsible parent.

Matthew Parris of the Times – if you read this I hope that you will revise your view of him as a charlatan and sham!

Les Gallop