Opinion

Mary Kelly: When will Johnson's lies catch up with him?

Boris Johnson once again stretched credulity to breaking point during his appearance at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. Picture by House of Commons/PA Wire
Boris Johnson once again stretched credulity to breaking point during his appearance at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. Picture by House of Commons/PA Wire Boris Johnson once again stretched credulity to breaking point during his appearance at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. Picture by House of Commons/PA Wire

IT is hard to write Boris Johnson's political obituary because he always seems to bounce back from every scandal that would have floored any of his predecessors.

Stretching credulity to breaking point, he told the House he thought the 'bring your own booze' party in the Downing Street garden was a work event, which does possibly explain his government's handling of the pandemic.

Will his lies ever catch up with him? He's due to face the 'deputy God' Sue Gray, who's heading the parties inquiry. She has a formidable reputation for straight dealing, which might be why she missed being appointed head of the NI Civil Service.

But others point out her previous form in blocking disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act, including sensitive documents for people campaigning for justice over the infected blood scandal in 2018 when thousands of people were infected with HIV and Hepatitis B during the 1970s and 1980s.

Newsnight reported that she also schooled special advisers on how to destroy email by 'double deletion' to thwart Freedom of Information requests.

Bet Martin Reynolds wishes he'd deleted his.

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BACK in the eighties, when I was a reporter on the Belfast Telegraph, I opened a letter to the editor. The writer, who didn't give a name, had carefully listed all the by-lines on the first few pages of the paper and categorised each one as Protestant or RC. Two of the Devlins, both proud east Belfast Protestants, were in the wrong category while a Catholic Drake was also misplaced.

The writer just noted that there were a lot of RC names in the paper now and added gnomically, "No coincidence, surely?" At the BBC, just a few years later, a listener rang in to complain that there were a lot of Seamuses and Seans on the airwaves. There were two.

He asked who he was speaking to and when I said my name he laughed. "Typical," he said, and hung up.

The memories came back to me when I read Kate Hoey's casual totting up of the nationalists who she said were part of an elite network using their status in law, the media and academia to advance nationalist political objectives.

I must have missed that bit when I was training to be a journalist. I also seemed to forget to advance nationalist objectives when I worked on the Tele and the Beeb for all those years.

The Baroness of Lylehill and Rathlin also claimed a 2018 letter signed by nationalists of various professions, calling on then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to ensure their rights were protected in the Brexit negotiations, was proof of this network.

Unionists, she said, did not do this, or if they did, no longer do.

At the time of the letter, unionists in the DUP were enthusiastically lobbying European Reform Group Tories, and had the ear of Prime Minister Theresa May. Stormont was also in suspension at the time, so there was no political venue for nationalist opinion.

And indeed, the nationalist letter provoked a unionist letter in response, signed by more than 100 people from various sections of NI society. Then in 2020, both unionist parties welcomed the establishment of a new civic society, 'We Make NI, to celebrate the centenary of the state.

Maybe Kate was away in England when that happened.

She also complained that when loyalists or unionists appeared in the media they were labelled by their political affiliation, but nationalists were "bestowed with a neutral descriptor such as political commentator".

There had yet to be a satisfactory explanation for that disparity, she said, most notably in BBC NI.

Well, when I was putting on those "labels" as a current affairs producer, it depended on the context. If they were former DUP MLAs, MPs or special advisers then it would be strange not to say so, especially when they were giving their views on what was happening in the party or politics generally, from a position of special insight.

If they were professional journalists from say, the Andersonstown News or News Letter, that would be their title. This was more complicated when you had two columnists who might both write for the Irish News, but also other publications. In this case they were "political commentators".

The Jamie Brysons of the world had their own category. He spoke on behalf of or with an understanding of loyalist organisations. Why should that not be stated? Daithí McKay and Danny Morrison never appeared without their Sinn Féin backgrounds being also noted. Maybe Kate missed that bit too.