Never mind the kipper, it’s us who will end up smoked

In our series on life at The Independent, Tom Peck reveals his trauma as we enter the era of Boris Johnson – having to report on a PM who flaunts his total disregard for the truth

It was fitting, in its way, that Boris Johnson’s last act in his three-decade-long campaign to become prime minister was the same as his first.

There he was, on Wednesday night, at the final Tory leadership hustings, holding aloft a smoked kipper, claiming that EU food safety regulations demanded it be shipped on its own “ice pillow”.

Complete drivel, of course. Drivel of the kind that propelled him to journalistic fame, and doing so much to crystallise this country’s misguided attitude to the European Union. Johnson became Brussels correspondent of The Daily Telegraph 30 years ago, and carved out a wildly successful niche in mendacious stories, like the ban on prawn cocktail crisps, the ban on recycling teabags and the law against eight year olds blowing up balloons. They have all been shown to be garbage.

There was at least some irony in that, with regard to the kipper lie, it was the current Brussels correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, James Crisp (flavour unspecified), who was first to put in the single phone call required to expose it as completely untrue.

It is particularly traumatising, for political journalists, as we enter the Johnson era, to have to think that we will be writing about someone who was once one of our own, and who held in total disregard what we like to imagine the sacred currency of our trade – the truth.

That Johnson chose, this week, to mark the culmination of his leadership campaign with a fresh, easily demonstrable lie about Brussels, tells us, yet again, all that is needed to be known about the man. It’s not merely that the truth is a matter of no concern at all. It is that he has found, over the years, that lying is an activity that has done him more good than harm. This is despite knowing he would be rumbled for his latest lie in a matter of seconds.

No prime minister of this country has ever begun his or her premiership in quite such a dark place. It is frightening to consider where it might end.

Yours,

Tom Peck

Political sketch writer