Boris Johnson was never going to resign if he didn’t have to. This is all about the Tory party’s view of him now. The party knows as well as you or I that Johnson lied about the lockdown parties. It knows that the lies hit middle Britain, conscientiously obeying the lockdown laws, in the gut. It knows the Tories will take a hit for it in the local elections and eventually the general election too. Yet, remarkably, when it weighs all this up, the Tory party thinks this does not matter all that much.
The ostensible reason now being offered is that a prime minister is too important to be dumped during a war. Britain’s own history shows how specious this claim is. Margaret Thatcher was ousted during the build-up to the Gulf war in 1990; Neville Chamberlain during the second world war in 1940; and Herbert Asquith was pushed aside during the first in 1916. Actually, you could argue that a war is a good time to ditch a failing prime minister, not a bad one.
And besides, who says we, Britain, are at war? There has been no declaration of war of the kind that Asquith and Chamberlain made. Nobody appears to have told the House of Commons either. Johnson is doing many good things in support of Ukraine and in helping to isolate Russia, but he has not sent a single British soldier, flyer or sailor into harm’s way. There absolutely is a war going on, but a large part of Johnson’s war is a pantomime version performed by a pantomime prime minister.
The facts are more prosaic. The party knows that Johnson is mortally wounded. But, since the complacent self-destruction of Rishi Sunak, it isn’t sure who would now win an election that Johnson would lose. How extraordinary it is that, among the 358 other Tory MPs, not one of them thinks they could do better. Instead, the party sits on its hands, making the craven calculation that there is more gravy to be made out of being in government, knowing full well that if a Labour prime minister had done this the indignation on the right would now be at ramming speed.
But the Tory party isn’t sitting on its hands about Johnson’s rule breaking alone. It is also complicit in the breaking of the rules – in the sense of the moral code of public life – itself. By saying it is better that Johnson should stay – better for the Tory party, better for the MPs, that is – the party is, in effect, asserting that this prime minister, uniquely, can lie to parliament without consequence, and break the law without paying a political price. That’s not merely shocking, but stupid.
There’s sometimes a lot of guff spoken about the marvel of the British unwritten constitution, but spend a moment examining those two claims. First, the lying. Yes, it happens in politics. Ministers are sometimes, as someone once put it, economical with the actualité. “In exceptional circumstances,” the Tory minister William Waldegrave even admitted in the 1990s, “it is necessary to say something that is untrue to the House of Commons.”
By this, however, Waldegrave meant something like protecting the value of the pound before a devaluation. There was nothing whatsoever exceptional, not in the smallest degree, about the circumstances in which Johnson told the House of Commons the lie about there being no lockdown parties in Downing Street. No national interest was involved, neither national security nor the pound was threatened. Johnson’s lie was purely self-serving and convenient. Lie, deny and move on is his mantra.
All the same, the lie he told was not unimportant. On the contrary. It was a lie about breaking a law that he himself had made, and that the rest of us were dutifully following for the common good. It was not about some victimless infraction like a parking ticket. It was a lie about breaking an emergency regulation to restrict a plague and ultimately save lives. Morally speaking, that is a world away from a parking ticket and only a fool in a hurry would not see the difference.
Yet in some ways what is most disturbing, though not most surprising, about the Tory party’s indifference is that it fits such a pattern. You can make a case that previous prime ministers may have also brought politics into disrepute. But has there ever been a leader whose actions and personality have said more clearly to his party that pretty much anything goes as long as we stay in power? Johnson’s disregard for rules and his readiness to cast convention aside are spectacular. But they have become the tip of an iceberg of entitlement that is not just disgraceful, but is threatening public life in Britain more widely.
Because it’s not just the PM. MPs now also refuse to resign for things that would once have been terminal to their careers. Their colleagues circle the wagons to defend the miscreants. In the Owen Paterson case, Johnson himself even led the effort to change the rules to let their chum off. Think also of the mateship and insider dealing that polluted the whole contracting process during the pandemic, and the way friends, chums and party donors are now routinely eased, no questions asked, into quango appointments and the House of Lords. We are talking about a system here, not just a person.
In her new book, Held in Contempt, Hannah White points out that institutions like parliament need constantly to provide evidence that they are competent, reliable and honest in order to assure the public to have confidence in them. Are we not now witnessing the exact opposite? These supposedly one-off problems like a prime ministerial lie, a bullying minister, a groping male MP, or an insider lobbyist are not isolated events now. As White puts it: “Every reported misdemeanour by an individual MP, every example of MPs acting as if rules do not apply to them, chips away at public respect for the House of Commons in a way that is not easy to repair. Confirmation bias is a powerful force, and the public have been primed to expect the worst.”
The Conservative party is now wilfully looking in the wrong direction over Johnson. Remember, there could be more fines yet to come. Sue Gray’s report has yet to be published too. This is not a prime minister who gets the big calls right, not when more than 160,000 British people have died of Covid he isn’t. Millions more are indignant and embarrassed about Johnson’s conduct. He is not up to the job. Our entitled governing party needs to wake up urgently to the reality that Britain deserves better.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist
