Bluff, bluster and bids to distract us

WHEN Boris Johnson spoke to the House of Commons about the police fine for partying during Covid, which has made him the first person in history to have been convicted for breaking the law while they were Prime Minister, he put on an act of contrition.

He claimed to apologise unreservedly. Yet we have it on the word of some of his own MPs that as soon as he left the Commons, he was back to his usual self.

One disgusted Tory MP has said that, like a schoolboy, his pretence of contrition lasted only as long as it took him to leave the headmaster’s study.

Another walked out of Boris’s behindclosed-doors meeting with Conservative MPs which was held immediately after his House of Commons appearance, because of what he called “bluster and pantomime”.

Boris then set off to India and later boasted that a trade deal was likely to be secured by the end of the year.

What he did not mention that was that

David Cameron and Theresa May have all headed delegations to India over the last decade, and made no progress because the Government would not give visas to Indian visitors and students.

The message was that we want your money but we don’t want your people.

Unless the Government is making a somersault on its immigration policies, Boris’s boast sounds like another lie, another attempt to distract people from Partygate.

Boris still claims that despite the police fine, he did not break the law. Apparently it’s the police who are wrong, not him. So much for his pretence of apologising. He is taking us for fools, but it’s clear now that we aren’t willing to be conned any more.

BORIS Johnson’s ‘apology’ in the wake of the Partygate scandal was sickening.

He delivered it ‘sincerely’ and then promised to deliver on the priorities of the British people, including levelling up across the whole of the United Kingdom and easing the burden caused by higher energy prices.

How many of us were not taken in by his act, and saw his apology as insincere words designed to fool us into letting him get away with it?

Did we notice that his attempts at levelling up have led us to the situation where ordinary working people are facing the greatest slide into deep poverty for half a century while at the same time millionaires and billionaires have never had it so good? A wealth tax is sorely needed.

How many of us noticed that he categorically refuses to ease the burden caused by energy prices when he could easily levy a windfall tax on energy companies, as France did very successfully? Instead he allows energy companies to enrich themselves with share buybacks and to invest in further oil

● Prime Minister Boris Johnson and gas extraction which will kill ‘keeping 1.5 degrees alive’ stone dead.

And still Conservative MPs refuse to do the right thing and remove this man from office. They are only concerned about re-election, not principle or constituents or country.

I hope the May council elections will show them the mistake they are making.