On Wednesday morning, Judge Heather Hallett, head of the Covid inquiry, was still dismayed by the ongoing absence of the elusive government WhatsApp messages. Like King Arthur in reverse, the government WhatsApp messages slept silently in a cave for eons, only to disappear in Albion’s hour of need.
The previous week, the Cabinet Office had declared it deemed the WhatsApp messages too irrelevant to be worth submitting to the scrutiny of the judge. But this week it decided they were in fact lost, and so couldn’t be submitted anyway. How careless this government has been in this respect. The health minister Lord Bethell lost his phone when a July 2021 hearing wanted it. Tories should have to write all their communications on their hands in permanent marker. And if the WhatsApps were lost how did anyone in the Cabinet Office get to look at them to decide they were irrelevant? No one at senior government level had thought it through. It was a classic Billy Bunter defence: “I didn’t eat your WhatsApp messages Jenkins, and anyway they were horrible.”
Installing Boris Johnson, a proven liar trusted by few and unacquainted with the concept of shame, in No 10 was always going to backfire eventually, like releasing a fat bear into your garden to scare away the cats that defecate in the vegetables, and then realising there is now a fat bear in your garden. But I don’t think anyone in the Tory party realised quite how quickly the Boris-bear would start burrowing under the garden fence and out into the world of accountable behaviour, where cocking your leg against the tree of truth and crapping on the pavement of public life is unacceptable.
Of course, no one must see WhatsApp messages that Johnson sent. The things Johnson said in public while in office were stupid enough. “Orientals… have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole.” “Working-class men… are… likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless.” “If gay marriage was OK then [why shouldn’t] a union be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog.” Imagine what Johnson said when he thought no one was listening.
Given that Johnson’s brain, a squidgy conflation of meat, burps and pus, embodies the abstract idea of the infinite number of monkeys and their infinite number of typewriters, it’s statistically likely that one of his WhatsApps is simply a long list of now frowned-upon slang words for women, gay people and foreigners, unsullied by verbs, like something Lawrence Fox might cry out to himself as he finishes masturbating.
It’s Wednesday afternoon and my deadline to hand in this funny column is approaching, but the inquiry’s deadline for receiving the WhatsApps is in 24 hours’ time. I checked Twitter. It seems that 58 minutes ago, Johnson’s spokesman insisted that Johnson had already given all the WhatsApp messages to the Cabinet Office months back. Presumably, Johnson is happy to take Sunak and everyone else down with him, or he’s assuming, given how bad the WhatsApps must be for the Tory brand, there’s no way they’ll ever get handed in to the inquiry, save being prised out of Rishi Sunak’s hands by Judge Heather Hallett herself, as the prime minister repeats different combinations of meaningless sentences, each containing the word “transparency”, until all his fingers are broken one by one using nutcrackers. Try operating a credit card reader now, prime minister!
The problem is, I am over my funny column delivery deadline now and the story just changed in such a fashion there’s no way of knowing if this will hang together until you read it with your crushed avocado in woke north London on Sunday morning. I just went and made my son something involving potato and now Johnson himself is telling Whitehall they should “urgently disclose” his WhatsApps to the inquiry. On Sunday morning, you write your own funny column. This is impossible.
It’s all very well the Tories trying to disappear their Johnson-era WhatsApp messages, but to escape the toxic radioactive half-life of his degraded legacy they will also have to disappear Johnson himself. And here’s a funny thing. Two hours or so ago, as I was meticulously researching the above paragraph of unsavoury Johnson quotes, I half-remembered dozens of equally dubious ones that Google could now find no trace of. I looked up the famous foolish images of Johnson – the flags on the zipwire, the staged pub garden rapprochement with Carrie. They were there, but not in anything like as many different manifestations. It was as if, somehow, Johnson were gradually being removed from the record.
Try it yourself. Do you remember that time Johnson stood in dog’s muck outside the home of a wheelchair-using Uxbridge constituent, and then trod it all through her house, despite her protestations? Thought not. It’s gone. Do you remember the time Johnson was caught on mic, while waiting for a Today programme interview to start, telling an unnamed woman a joke about an African man with a speech impediment running after an ice-cream van? No. Do you remember the time when, filmed red-faced and excited at a Brexit referendum night party, he was caught on camera mopping his brow with something he pulled from his pocket that turned out to be a pair of heavily bloodstained white Y-fronts? No. There is no evidence of it. Systematically, as it struggles to survive by dissociating itself from him, the Tory party is erasing the record. (The Observer lawyers require me to point out that this paragraph is a joke.)
I’m handing this in now. By Sunday morning maybe this Mexican standoff will have ended. Remember when we used to sneer at the Italian politicians? In the good old days.
Basic Lee is on tour, including six dates at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in June and July, and a fun-size ™ ® version of the show at the Stand’s New Town theatre, Edinburgh, 11-20 August
