It’s the way they tell ’em!
As Dominic Cummings claims he drove 60 miles to, er, check his eyesight, HENRY DEEDES revels in the far-fetched porkies that make so many powerful men look ridiculous
ExCUSES, excuses. To think we thought we’d heard ’em all. Then up pops Dominic Cummings on a roasting Bank Holiday afternoon to serve us a 24-carat corker.
His explanation that he made a 60-mile round trip from his parents’ Durham farm to picturesque Barnard Castle on Easter Sunday merely to check that his eyesight was up to driving back to London raised more questions than it was supposed to answer.
Why couldn’t the Prime Minister’s senior aide simply have taken a spin around his family estate, rather than embark on a 90-minute journey? Why did his wife and child need to accompany him? It was an account so iffy it was a mercy it didn’t make the petals in Downing Street’s Rose Garden wilt.
Before he’d even finished his rambling explanation, a nation cried collectively: ‘Pull the other one, pal!’
And so Cummings’ alibi looks destined to join a long line of political tall tales which simply don’t cut la moutarde in the believability stakes.
Here’s a collection of similar eye-rollers we’ve heard over the years...
THE BADGER ENTHUSIAST
POOR Ron Davies. The once high-flying Secretary of State for Wales was sacked from Tony Blair’s cabinet in 1998 after a selfproclaimed ‘moment of madness’ (© Alastair Campbell) when he was nicked on Clapham Common while seeking an amorous exchange with a gay stranger.
Five years later, controversy struck again when he was pictured leaving a well-known cruising spot on a lay-by near Bath. Ron’s response: ‘I’ve actually been there watching badgers.’
After unsuccessfully standing as a Plaid Cymru candidate in 2012, Davies has fallen off the radar, which is a pity. A guest slot on BBC’s Springwatch helping Kate Humble seek out snuffle-nosed critters in the West Country gloaming would be a hoot for us viewers.
THE LESSONS IN TECHNOLOGY
BORIS JOHNSON’S first Conservative conference as Prime Minister last year was overshadowed by reports of his friendship with IT expert Jennifer Arcuri, a turbocharged blonde with a Gatling gun gob for gibberish.
Despite claims that BoJo had visited her East London flat while he was London Mayor, poledancing Jen denied impropriety, with a friend of hers explaining he had just ‘wanted to be hip and understand tech’.
Boris was recently cleared of investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct for giving Arcuri £126,000 in public funding for her tech company, Hacker House. But ‘technology lessons’ is surely destined to replace Private Eye’s famous ‘discussing Uganda’ phrase — allegedly deployed by journalist Mary Kenny after disappearing at a party with one of the country’s cabinet ministers — as politics’ sexual euphemism du jour.
‘JIM’ THE REPAIR MAN
AH, KEITH VAZ. That unnerving mixture of vinegar and oil. Voice like a well-tuned French horn. Gait like a tarantula. What a uniquely creepy piece of work he is.
The one-time European Minister’s political undoing finally came in 2016, when reports surfaced of him soliciting sex from two male prostitutes and offering to pay for cocaine for a third, all the while posing, for reasons unknown, as an industrial washing machine repair man called Jim.
The coup de grace in this richly exotic cocktail of sex, drugs and washing machine hoses came when Keith/Jim explained to the Parliamentary authorities that his newly acquired chums had merely dropped round to his apartment at 11.30pm on a Saturday night ‘to discuss interior decor’.
A deeply unimpressed House of Commons standards commissioner took one look at Vazeline’s claims and branded them ‘not believable and, frankly, ludicrous’.
THE VERY DRY PRINCE
WHAT was the most winceinducing moment of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein?
His soft-soaped description of Epstein’s paedophilia as ‘unbecoming’?
The ‘straightforward shooting weekend’ he enjoyed with Ghislaine Maxwell?
No, the true hide-behind-the-sofa moment came when the Prince attempted to rubbish his accuser Virginia Roberts’ claims that he had been ‘dripping from sweat’ as they danced together at Tramp nightclub.
Apparently he had a ‘peculiar condition’ which prevented him from perspiring after being shot at during the
Falklands War. To compound this palpable codswallop, it was said that after the cameras finished rolling, the clunk-headed Prince insouciantly sauntered over to Windsor Castle to inform his mother the interview had all gone rather swimmingly.
‘I WAS THERE BUT NOT INVOLVED’
JEREMY CORBYN’S capacity for making a bad situation worse was no better illustrated than in 2018, when a bombshell picture unearthed by the Daily Mail showed him at a Tunisia wreath-laying ceremony in 2014 for the terrorists who carried out the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
The then Labour leader’s
response to the controversy — ‘I was present at that wreath-laying, I don’t think I was actually involved in it’ — was roundly considered unsatisfactory.
Corbyn’s leadership never did shrug off the anti-Semitism charges which hung over his party prior to their electoral thumping last December.
This incident marked the murkiest stain on his unpleasant tenure.
THE CONSTANT GARDENER
AmID the duck houses and moat dredging, few more laughable excuses emerged from the 2010 expenses scandal than from Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who employed a gardener at his second home in Sheffield Hallam at £160 a month.
Rather than hastily apologise for his dodgy claims and repay the money like fellow leaders Gordon Brown and David Cameron, Cleggy, that creamy bastion of metropolitan selfrighteousness, sought to make a virtue of his largesse.
He’d needed taxpayer-funded assistance with his garden, he claimed, ‘to make sure it wasn’t a complete eyesore’.
Quite right. Not as if his wife, spicy chica miriam Gonzalez Durantez, could ever have been expected to don her dungarees and do the weeding.
Of course, with the ex-deputy Pm now installed in a megabucks job at Facebook, the couple can afford a whole fleet of footmen to prune their petunias.
‘I DIDN’T INHALE’
WHeN Bill Clinton was asked during the 1992 Presidential campaign whether he had ever broken the law, the young Arkansas Governor delivered a response which has since entered political folklore.
‘When I was in england, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t inhale it and never tried it again.’ Clinton’s answer was much mocked at the time, but has come to be regarded as a masterpiece of political chicanery. It proved to young voters that he was a more streetwise dude than the rest of the stuffed shirts on Capitol Hill, and showed the older ones he was too smart to get involved in drugs.
Clinton’s leadership encompassed that ‘all things to all men’ approach to politics soon to be aped by Tony Blair.
But there was no more astute practitioner than Phoney Baloney Bill.