Johnson hopes Putin’s war will save him, but
don’t be fooled – ‘Partygate’ still matters
Owen Jones
It is said that compared to the crisis in Ukraine, N0
10’s offences were trivial. But the PM must pay for this abuse of power
Boris
Johnson leaving 10 Downing Street, 15 March. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters
Tue 29 Mar
2022 15.25 BST
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Now that
the Metropolitan police have issued 20 fines to government officials for
violating the Covid rules they were tasked with drawing up, there are two
things we can conclude about Boris Johnson. Either, when he declared less than
four months ago that “all the guidelines were observed”, he was completely
ignorant about the laws he was directly responsible for – or he repeatedly and
shamelessly lied. There is a third possibility – he had no idea what was going
on in the prime minister’s official residence – that is too insulting to anyone’s
intelligence to even bother indulging.
Which of
the two options is true is interesting as an academic debate, but both provide
the same answer to the basic question: “Regardless of your political
standpoint, is this person fit for high office?” Let’s indulge it anyway.
Johnson is, notoriously, not known as a details man. If the phrase “educated
beyond his intelligence” could sprout arms, legs and a contrived untidy mop, it
would be him. Oxbridge does not, unfortunately, lack his type: mediocre youngsters
ensconced in privilege, whose pretentious vocabulary and unnecessary use of
Latin disguises a lack of depth and knowledge.
As foreign
secretary, his civil servants privately briefed that he had “the attention span
of a gnat”, and that submissions to him “needed to be short, and they needed to
be clear about what he was being asked to do”. His public statement that Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was training journalists in Iran, rather than visiting
relatives on holiday, was one example of how his lack of attention to details
produces dreadful real-world consequences. That Johnson reportedly leaves
top-secret papers strewn across a flat that he shares with his wife, Carrie –
who is known to be close friends with British journalists who visit their
residence – shows that he is a fundamentally unserious, lazy man who thinks
consequences are for other people.
It is so
clearly a matter of public record that the prime minister is a liar that the
very act of claiming he is not a liar is itself a deception: he was, after all,
sacked twice, as journalist and politician, for not telling the truth. His
former employee the journalist Peter Oborne compiled an entire book, The
Assault on Truth, dedicated to documenting his lies, but there wasn’t enough
space to include them all so he set up a sprawling website to finish the task.
The only leeway that could be given is that men so pathologically obsessed with
lying lose their grasp of the difference between fact and fiction, and so can
lie without even being conscious of it.
The likely
conclusion, therefore, is that Johnson is both a liar and someone who cannot
absorb very clear and basic information, unlike the millions of ordinary people
who fully understood and complied with laws that he was ultimately responsible
for designing and communicating. You wouldn’t trust a man with this combination
of qualities with the most rudimentary responsibilities – and yet he is running
your entire country.
As Vladimir
Putin’s forces continue to unleash barbarism on the people of Ukraine, the
prime minister’s acolytes’ argument will be tediously predictable. Does the war
not put a few boozy gatherings in No 10 in perspective? Must we obsess over
such trivialities while children are being slaughtered? Don’t fall for it:
moral clarity demands that the horror in Ukraine must not be used to smother
objections to the corruption of our democracy, which is what this is.
Yes,
Johnson’s team believe that Putin’s tanks have rescued their man, and they can
wave polling statistics that suggest their Teflon-coated conman has crawled
from the electoral abyss. Labour’s consistent failure to offer an inspiring
alternative, relying instead on their opponents’ fetish for self-immolation to
win by default, has certainly helped the Tories. But this really does matter.
It’s not just that so many citizens could not hold the hands of dying loved
ones, or endured crippling extended loneliness, and therefore feel righteous
fury at their rulers. It’s that if our government gets away with rampantly
disobeying laws that were used to victimise the powerless – including arresting
homeless people and fining children – then they will, rightly, believe that
they can get away with other abuses of power.
Many
understood that “one rule for them, another rule for us” was a key guiding
principle in British society, but it has now been erected in big, flashing neon
lights over the heart of government.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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