If you ever wondered what Jim Jones’s corpse would have looked like if it had spent three weeks getting bleached and bloated by a Guyana river, it floated up to the House of Commons dispatch box yesterday at 3.30pm.
Let’s begin with some real talk. The prime minister is under police investigation for multiple breaches of his own Covid laws. At least four gatherings or parties in which Boris Johnson was directly involved are being probed by the Met, including one in his private flat. In total, police are investigating 12 potentially law-breaking Downing Street parties which took place after the British people had been ordered – BY HIM – to live under the most draconian restrictions imposed in peacetime. The Global Britain that Johnson promised saw him yesterday bin off a call to the Russian president, who is apparently on the brink of an invasion, so that he could explain that he needs to wait for police officers to decide if he went to an illicit party in his own home. The Conservative MPs somehow able to make their peace with all this increasingly resemble cult members accepting the latest transparent lies and failures of a cult leader.
Suitcases full of Kool-Aid seem to have been wheeled into Boris Johnson’s meeting with Tory MPs last night. Two weeks ago, Birmingham Northfield MP Gary Sambrook was widely reported to be one of the leading lights of a plot to remove Johnson; last night he issued a dispatch from the compound in which he declared the PM to be “the Boris Johnson we love and who has delivered”. Sorry, Gary, but wake up. This ends with a bungling Swat team going through the window and discovering the whole place is wired.
As for what Johnson said to his followers last night, he is reported to have compared himself to Othello, who he seems to think was “always seeing the best in people”. Righto. To confirm: the country isn’t just being run by a guy who can’t even understand the plot of Othello, but by a guy who can’t even understand the plot of Othello and is writing a book about Shakespeare. It’s called not giving a fuck, Gary – look it up. That said, good to see the PM getting his excuses in early for shopping Desdemona to the cops for her Abba party.
And yet, for someone who normally puts the I am into iambic pentameter, Johnson will still only speak in the first person plural when it comes to “taking responsibility” for what his investigator Sue Gray found to be “failures of leadership”. What a tell. As he preferred it yesterday in his statement to the Commons: “We must look ourselves in the mirror, and we must learn.” Who’s we? Face it, Gary – he’s the least convincing man in the mirror since Michael Jackson.
In fact, speaking of paedos, the prime minister chose to use one as a figleaf. Such a Churchill move. When the hour for leadership came, Johnson opted to knowingly advance a grotesque and indefensible conspiracist lie that Keir Starmer failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile when he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service.
All Conservatives who regard themselves as decent need to ask if it’s really that much of a leap from this sort of thing to some of the other paedophile-based conspiracies that are increasingly part of the dangerous undertow of global populist policies. If they’re not up to it, it will continue. On past form, the Met will spend months not getting to the bottom of things. Should any fines be issued, I’m sure Johnson will get some Tory donor to set up a blind trust to pay for his. He should start running a cash phoneline during PMQs, like a proper televangelist.
At least those who remember what the past two years were actually like – ie everyone – can be glad that Gray’s update acknowledged something crucial. Yes, she stated, working at Downing Street during the pandemic was challenging. “Those challenges, however, also applied to key and frontline workers across the country who were working under equally, if not more, demanding conditions, often at a risk to their own health … The hardship under which citizens across the country worked, lived and sadly even died while observing the government’s regulations and guidance rigorously are known only too well.”
This is a vital counter to the frankly eye-popping number of anonymous exceptionalist briefings from Downing Street employees which talk about the “saviour complex” some staff apparently felt. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, no one has ended up being more elitist than the guys who swept to power promising to smash elites, but who turned out to regard themselves as miles above rules that were followed even in extremis by silly little people like the actual head of state.
It wasn’t always this way. By chance, one of my children last week visited Bletchley Park, which as you know was the centre of the Allied code-breaking operation during the second world war, without which the war might not have been won, and where heroic efforts are judged to have shortened it by between two and four years. At Bletchley, he tells me, they only started serving beer at the end of a shift in 1944. To put that into perspective, by that stage there was a fourth rotor on the Enigma machine, meaning the possible combinations had leapt to truly head-frying levels, and the staff had been working round the clock at the facility for five years of global war under the constant threat of bombing. Flash forward to 2020. When they were getting pissed at 6pm in the garden in May, the desk johnnies of Downing Street had been stewarding a peacetime lockdown for TWO EFFING MONTHS. I mean, if you can’t do that without intravenous prosecco, then … buck up?! Run along and work in interiors PR? This is the same self-awareness-to-self-regard ratio as people who list their occupation as “film producer”.
As things stand, insufficient numbers of Conservative MPs are prepared to wake up and smell the cordite. But all the Tories defending Johnson and skirting over these insults to ordinary people shouldn’t feel alone in the world. They have as their spiritual cousins all those craven Republicans who now refuse to condemn Donald Trump despite the fact they know he is a liar and a crook, know that he only cares about himself and thinks that rules are for little people, and know that he regards even them with a mixture of amusement and contempt.
Backing Johnson in the face of all this is really not much different from scuttling down to Mar-a-Lago to pay obeisance and hoping you get smiled at. Come on – what’s the worst that can happen?
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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