Cometh the hour, cometh the man. In the end it had come down to a two-horse race between Nadine Dorries and Grant Shapps to take on the morning media round as they had been the only members of the Tory Wankocracy stupid enough to answer their phones. Even James Cleverly, aka Jimmy Dimly, had remembered to switch his mobile to silent.
And while there was little to choose between Nadine’s and Grant’s abject, needy loyalty to Boris Johnson, No 10 thought that on balance Shapps was the better bet. Nadine was just too much of a liability and could lash out – she might even embarrass herself by threatening to cut ITV’s public funding – while Grant was just perfect. In his Michael Green get-rich-quick persona, he had just the qualities required. No one could talk shit quite so shamelessly. And with such utter contempt for his audience.
Shapps began every interview by saying how disappointed he had been. He never made clear what it was exactly that he was disappointed about, though the longer he went on, the more it seemed that what saddened him the most was that the Convict had been caught. Boris’s real crime was getting found out. In the Platonic Johnsonian world to which Grant was a paid-up subscriber, the good guys were the bad guys who always got away with it. To be collared by the Met and be fined £50 was not part of the script. He didn’t even make a pretence of trying to defend Rishi Sunak. The chancellor is toast, having not had the self-worth to resign.
It was like this, said Shapps. The prime minister was mortified to have been caught breaking the law and had apologised for that. And if Shapps could find it in his heart to accept that apology and forgive him, then the rest of us ought to be able to do so too. He seemed to imply you had to be completely heartless not to accept the self-pitying contrition of a serial liar. After all, the Convict had even paid the fixed-penalty notice. Shapps said this as if it was in some way surprising and was something for which we should be profoundly grateful. Perhaps we should. Boris isn’t known for readily paying his debts.
Having done his utmost to minimise the crime, Shapps went on to trivialise it still further. All that Johnson had done was walk into the wrong room by mistake. If he had only just kept going and gone up to his flat, then none of this would have happened. Instead he had wandered into the cabinet room to find himself ambushed by cake, booze, colleagues, his wife and the interior designer. And possibly Dilyn the dog. So he had naturally assumed he was in yet another, unscheduled work meeting.
Grant’s killer line was that we had to remember the prime minister was a total idiot who couldn’t recognise a party when he was at one. There had never been any intention for the Convict to attend any of the parties for which he was under investigation. He was just a terribly unlucky ingenu with a bad track record of turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a total coincidence that he had been at so many parties. Not that he had been at any other parties. Or that his birthday party had been a party. It was up to the police to decide what was a party, though he hoped they’d do a better job of it in the future than they had managed on Tuesday.
“It wasn’t his intention to lie,” Shapps continued. “There was no malice in anything he did.” Johnson had never set out to break the law. It had just never occurred to him that the law might also apply to him. He had always assumed the rules were for the Little People. As for the lies, the Convict couldn’t be expected to help himself. Lying was what he always did. He had lied to his family, he had lied to his friends and he had lied to the country. And if he had lied to the Queen about the prorogation, there was every possibility that the “Lion of Kyiv” had also lied to President Zelenskiy. So lying to parliament was no big deal. Just grow up and grow some. Johnson was an Honourable Man. An Honourable Liar.
Here was the deal: sure, Johnson might have broken the law and lied about it and everything else. Anyone for 42 new hospitals? But his track record spoke for itself.
It certainly did. Though not in the way Shapps might have hoped. Inflation is creeping up month by month. The cost of living and energy prices are now critical. Brexit is a disaster with exports down and lorry tailbacks from Dover. The economy is tanking and all the Convict can do is take pleasure in the failure of Sunak’s spring statement. The only area in which Johnson can take credit is his handling of the war in Ukraine. Though that was no reason for not replacing him with someone with a basic respect for the rule of law. And the country.
We should be grateful to have such a brilliant leader, Shapps declared. I’d hate to see what a piss-poor leader looked like. But Grant was off on one, rushing on as he wound up several interviews from which he had emerged relatively unscathed. It turns out that lying isn’t such a bad plan after all. Jacob Rees-Mogg was discovering much the same thing on TalkRadio. The rules were wrong and Johnson had set an example by breaking them. We couldn’t have a leadership contest because we were at war – news to all of us – and in any case we needed the Convict far more than he needed us. What we had done to deserve such a liar and a charlatan he didn’t say.
