Nobody stopped the first person to write it in the public prints and nobody now urges anyone else to desist. The prime minister of the United Kingdom is commonly described as a liar and nobody objects. Things have come to a pretty pass.
Boris Johnson is a liar. There. Doesn’t even feel good to write it now in a decent, properly libel-averse newspaper - where it is only also permissible to write that Donald Trump is a liar.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson - christened appropriately for a future raging narcissist though he could have tried to be different - is uncontroversially recognised as on a par with Trump. Lies as he opens his mouth. Nobody believes he tells the truth, or so it appears. The saga of his untruths is central to what even previously smarmy Tory media are calling the omnishambles, the litany of botches and scandals that would have finished off most previous Tory prime ministers and in even the smallest dose, every Labour leader in the job.
Recent recaps of his deceits to lovers (using the term loosely as he appears to have always done, at least until now), and to officials, employers and a long-gone Tory leader, are the backdrop to the current melodrama. That wallpaper is back in the news, the garish, woefully expensive interior decor that he denies lying about.
If sharp tribunes of the people Ant and Dec are any guide Covid-regulation-flouting inside Number Ten seems to have ‘cut through’ to wider public opinion. Suggestions persist of parties, perhaps with journalist friends, inside the flat next door that Johnson lives in with his wife and now two children. The Guardian’s Marina Hyde on ‘the incestuous political-media complex in this backwater country, says she reads that a journalist is godfather to the older child but perhaps ‘the PM has so many kids it’s like jury service’ and every UK adult could be asked.
Johnson’s response to the hail of disgust has been to rubbish the tearful press secretary who voluntarily resigned, and produce a panicked Plan B. He is due to get that through Westminster today thanks to Labour support. Necessary to make up for rebellious anti-regulation Tory MPs plus some furious at his lies to them, never mind to the public.
Labour leader Keir Starmer says he’s supporting the NHS and the public rather than the prime minister because the volume of Covid cases is so worrying. Some are so outraged by Johnson, and his government, that they won’t accept that. Others will see it as leadership, which in these weird times can be demonstrated in other places than politics.
Instructed by its owners, our favourite restaurant is well into a new regime. The young staff speak their lines with conviction. If people choose not to demonstrate that they have been vaccinated, they tell them they choose not to admit them. Out of respect for themselves, the staff, and for other customers. Freedom of choice? Cuts both ways.
There is one puzzle. People are silent who ought to be outraged by what until this prime minister’s tenure they would have called slander, and heard as an attack on all they held dear. These are people respectful beyond reason of what they laud as the British reputation for propriety, seriousness, civic virtue. They take no note of history. The empire they venerate was a construct unknown to every other people that lived in it.
I speak of those usually-loudest among unionists. Where’s their defence of Boris? It’s too late to tune up now. Way too late to moan that he’s lied to them as well, though everyone else knows that. But it’s unlikely that they’ll come out now to contribute to the chronicle of his fibs and shout ‘us too’. They would see that as aiding the enemy. Even though the enemy is the Great British public, perhaps at last turning right off Boris.
