I’ve looked into those puffy lying eyes many times. They dart around from rim to rim, bleary and red.
They narrow as he searches for words. Terrified of being boring, or more probably of being caught out, he reaches for bigger words and crazier images, which he uses as a smokescreen.
That’s how he ended up saying the wrong thing about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – a mistake that landed her back in prison in Iran – when he was up before us on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
This week Boris Johnson and I were up against each other again at the Liaison Committee. It was surreal. He didn’t have his phone, but we were all reading that the Cabinet was finally mustering against him. He alone knew nothing.
Yet he endlessly blustered and blathered, telling each of us: “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
We all thought, I don’t think so, matey. The only thing you’re getting back to is a P45.
Unlike the song in Hamilton, The Room Where It Happens, it felt as if the main character was there in the room with us, but this wasn’t where the real action was.
He tried to be jovial with me. But the greased piglet couldn’t squirm any more. He admitted people thought they had heard him say “all the sex pests are supporting me”, even though he maintained he hadn’t said it.
So he knowingly put a “sex pest” in one of the most powerful positions in Parliament. And his allies took liberties because they knew he took liberties and expected to get away with it. At this point his eyes started rolling around dementedly in his head. Then came his “resignation speech”. Some called it “dignified”. Don’t make me laugh. It didn’t even include the word resignation and it was about as dignified as Kenneth Williams screaming “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me” in Carry On Cleo.
He still thinks it has been an enormous privilege for us to have had him as our prime minister. He’s completely innocent in the court of his own opinion. We’ve all let him down. That’s gold-plated delusion.
He’s not the only one who needs to look at himself long and hard in the mirror, though. The whole point of the line about “one bad apple” is that it spoils the whole barrel. It’s like the curate’s egg – it can’t be good in parts. If it’s off, it’s all off. And that’s the problem with all the Tories, now.
I have Tory friends. I am genuinely fond of some of them and I try to work collaboratively with them. Some, including the chief whip Chris Heaton-Harris, came to my birthday party this year.
But they put him in place. They supported him. They defended him. They found reasons to stay in office even though they knew – and told us all privately – that he was a wrong ’un. Maybe they persuaded themselves they were indispensable. Or maybe they just liked the salary.
But they were complicit. They’re tainted. And they all have to go.
