Just call me Mystic Meg. Why get Lord Pannick, one of the most expensive barristers in the country, to help with your defence when you can have me instead? I’m a lot cheaper for a start. And have far fewer typos in my copy. With me, the privileges committee would have been able to publish Boris Johnson’s Dodgy Dossier on Monday evening. There again, Guardian readers got to read it then anyway.
Mid-morning on Tuesday the Dodgy Dossier was finally released. And it was uncannily similar to the sketch I had written the day before. It just goes to show yet again that you can never go far wrong by thinking the worst of Boris. It also proves that even a £5,000 an hour brief can’t work miracles with duff material. When the dust finally clears on Boris’s parties, Pannick won’t be looking back on his involvement with the Convict as his finest hour. Still. As a brief, you win some, you lose some. And it was the taxpayer who was picking up the tab.
Boris appears to have two lines of defence. Both completely contradictory. The first version is that a person known to be a sociopathic liar can never be guilty of misleading anyone. The argument goes like this: everyone knew that Boris told lies. In parliament and outside. He’d been doing it all his life. Lying was effectively his Unique Selling Point. So he couldn’t have deliberately or recklessly misled parliament. Rather he was just doing what came naturally.
This is the most psychologically satisfying defence as it has a certain coherence. But relying on your reputation for lying to get off on a charge of lying is a tough sell to the privileges committee.
Perhaps sensing an ontological debate about the meaning of lying was not going to quite cut it, Johnson switched to his second defence. This was the one that involved a personality transplant. Now we were being asked to believe that the Boris we had all known – and in a few cases loved – was not the real Boris at all.
Time and again, the dossier insists that Boris could not possibly have misled parliament because he is just not the kind of person who would say anything untrue. This is very much a Boris that has remained hidden throughout his life. How can you tell if Boris is lying? Because he’s breathing and his lips are moving.
And it’s been a hugely successful character trait for him. Because it’s seen him go from being sacked by the Times – for lying, natch – to becoming prime minister via lying his way to making the country 4% poorer in the Brexit referendum. So what goes around, comes around. It’s only fitting that if lying took him to the top, then it will take him back down again.
There was a variation on this new persona. That he was just a trusting dupe. Led astray by advisers who should have known better. Rather forgetting he had only appointed these advisers because they could be trusted to be untrustworthy. Boris had just been an innocent abroad. A simple man who didn’t have a clue what a party was. Had been assured that the parties had never been parties even though he had been responsible for the legislation banning lockdown parties. The photos of him at the parties were merely evidence that these weren’t parties because no one would be stupid enough to take pictures of themselves at illegal parties. And breathe.
Boris had somehow not noticed he had even attended some of the parties that weren’t parties. People getting pissed, throwing up and shagging was just all in a day’s work at No 10. And somehow in the short drive from Downing Street to the Commons he had managed to forget he had ever been to any of these parties that he didn’t know were parties but now accepts were parties.
Ah, forget it. There may have been worse defences. But none immediately come to mind. Boris, we know, will get through his four-hour session on Wednesday without any displays of guilt or shame. They are alien qualities to him. The most we can expect are flashes of temper. More eyes will be on his lordship. Doing his best to guide his witness and trying not to wonder if his reputation will ever recover. Boris has long since trashed his permanently. The Dodgy Dossier no more than a stepping stone to oblivion.
Over in the Commons, Suella Braverman wasn’t doing much for her own reputation. You’d have thought that a home secretary might take the Casey report into the Metropolitan police seriously. Might want to take action. Not our Suella. Twenty-four years after the Macpherson report found the Met to be institutionally racist, Lady Casey’s adds misogynistic and homophobic to the charge sheet. Only Braverman didn’t really seem that bothered. Then neither did many Tory MPs. Only 18 backbenchers turned up for the statement.
Suella spoke softer and slower than usual. As if that would be enough. She started by insisting that there really wasn’t that much wrong with the Met. Just a few bad apples. She wanted a police that cared more about their own safety rather than ours. Really. She didn’t even bother to mention violence against women until she was prompted. Labour’s Jess Phillips was apoplectic.
Then so were the few Tories in the chamber. They couldn’t work out why the home secretary was so chilled. They demanded action now. Even Lee Anderson wanted root and branch reform of the Met. Not Suella. Imagine being less woke than Lee. Things would probably change. Left to Suella it’s odds on that in another 24 years’ time we’ll still be wondering how to fix the Met.
