John Crace
With government taking a wild west approach to
law-breaking, Labour chose to focus instead on Evgeny Lebedev’s peerage
Michael
Ellis,
As so
often, it fell to paymaster general, Michael Ellis, to defend the indefensible
in the Commons. Photograph: Parliament TV
Tue 29 Mar 2022
22.51 BST
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The denial
was near total. You’d have thought that Boris Johnson would have had plenty of
time to prepare a response to the Metropolitan police’s decision to issue the
first bang-to-rights 20 fixed-penalty notices. After all, they can hardly have
come as a surprise. Only it seems that everything is a surprise to the Suspect
– or the Criminal as we may soon have to call him – these days.
So much so
that he’s still not sure if he actually went to a party during lockdown even
though the police have concluded that loads of people did. Even now he’s
swearing blind that no one did anything wrong in No 10. The police must have
made a mistake. If it wasn’t already before, it really is now one rule for him
and another for the rest of us.
Imagine the
scale of the delusion. It had been a lovely sunny day and “Party Marty”, aka
Martin Reynolds, had suggested that the Downing Street staff get a bit pissed
together in the garden after work. Just to cheer everyone up a bit and to thank
them for all their hard work. And he had even been sure to ask everyone to
bring their own booze because he had been thoughtful enough to remember that
the Suspect was quite mean and didn’t want to have to pay for people to get
trashed. Party Marty had even sent around an email confirming all the details.
But for
some reason Boris had not only failed to read the email, he had totally
forgotten there had been a party arranged for that evening. So when he had
wandered outside with Carrie, he had been totally baffled to discover the
garden of No 10 full of people, along with trestle tables weighed down with
food and drink. Obviously he had been too polite to ask what everyone was doing
there, so he just went along with it. As you do. And it goes without saying
that it had also completely slipped the Suspect’s mind that he had introduced
legislation preventing people socialising and that parties were illegal.
Now it gets
positively spooky. Because the same thing kept happening time and time again
and each time the prime minister forgot about the pandemic. There were at least
12 parties in Downing Street – Johnson attended at least six of them – and the
Suspect was somehow convinced that no parties had ever taken place. And,
bizarrely, still is.
Despite the
police having now concluded the first stage of the investigations and found the
law had repeatedly been broken at No 10, Boris is still adamant that he had
only ever attended work events. It was totally normal for staff to get roaring
drunk, break the toddler’s swing and toss the empties into the flower bed at
pandemic planning meetings. What happened in No 10, stayed in No 10. And that
also went for the fixed-penalty notices. Anyone who got fined would not be
obliged to resign or even admit they had broken the law. This was government as
the wild west.
No wonder
then that Labour have become ever more inclined not to take the prime minister
at his word. If the police don’t feel they can trust him, why should anyone
else? Either the Suspect is a lying, narcissistic sociopath who has no idea of
the boundaries between right or wrong, or he’s out of his head on psychotropic
drugs and is living in a parallel, hallucinatory universe. Or both possibly. So
Angela Rayner turned an opposition day debate into a humble address to force
the government into releasing information about the appointment of Evgeny
Lebedev to the Lords. Just to make sure there was no wrongdoing.
You could
sense that Rayner would rather have been letting rip about the FPNs and Johnson
having lied to parliament than debating Lebedev, but the Commons had been
warned not to stray off topic – even to join the dots about the prime
minister’s lack of judgment – so Labour’s deputy leader stuck to her brief. Her
request was simple. The Guardian and Sunday Times reported that the
intelligence services had originally recommended Lebedev as unsuitable for a
peerage. Indeed the head of MI6 had even refused to have lunch with the
oligarch.
So Rayner
just wanted to check whether their concerns were genuine and the Suspect had
doctored their recommendations in forcing the Lords’ appointments committee to
change its mind. Or whether Johnson was just shallow, venal and corrupt and
wanted to reward someone who invited him to flash parties – the lengths he
might have gone to drop his security detail after the Nato meeting to get
trashed in Lebedev’s castle in Italy – and gave him good coverage in the
Evening Standard. As for Lebedev, was he in hock to Putin like his dad or was
he just a spoilt airhead?
As so
often, it fell to paymaster general, Michael Ellis, to defend the indefensible
in the Commons. Fortunately, Ellis has no sense of self-worth and will say
almost anything to advance his own career. Though this time he was almost on
his own as many of the rest of the Tory backbenchers had decided – after the
Owen Paterson lobbying fiasco – that it wasn’t a good look to be seen to be
trying to cover up possible wrongdoing and had said they would vote with
Labour. If there was dirt on Lebedev, then so be it. And if there wasn’t, then
there was no harm in making the details of his appointment public. Weirdly,
there are some Tories who feel the probity of the prime minister still matters.
Ellis tried
to make the case that even the Suspect had given up on. There was nothing
remotely abnormal about Lebedev becoming a peer, he said sotto voce. If the
prime minister’s brother and Zac Goldsmith could become Lords then anyone
could. Perhaps one day, even Ellis himself might reach such heights. He could
dream.
Lebedev had
just been your everyday billionaire who had taken pity on a down-on-his-luck
London mayor and backed him through thick and thin. The intelligence services
were just guilty of Russophobia in turning him down. It didn’t help that
Lebedev was busy tweeting that it was an outrage the Commons was debating his
peerage. You can take the boy out of the Kremlin but you can’t take the Kremlin
out of the boy.
Only two
Tory MPs bothered to speak up for Ellis and for the rest of the debate he cut a
lone figure. Just waiting for the moment his own party chose not to vote with
him at the division. Like so much of his life, his contribution had been
entirely pointless.
Though
Ellis wan’t the only one to stick up for the Suspect’s inherent honesty and
magnificence. Over on the BBC, Matt Hancock, whose skin-crawling neediness is
in a league of its own, was saying that he didn’t care if Boris had lied or
broken the rules. Johnson was the right person to be leading the country
regardless. Just gizza job. Or a peerage. Lord Love Nest.
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