Boris Johnson’s body language was not a sight for the squeamish today.
Scuttling into the House with Sunak, looking like two schoolboys called before the head, he sat with his head sunk low and his shoulders hunched up to above ear height in a guilty-looking crouch while Sunak sat behind him, over-straightening his tie in what looked like a signal of inner anxiety.
The Prime Minister has recently become very good at delivering apologies but this was his poorest performance to date.
His technique was to attempt an apology ‘sandwich’, beginning by pointing out he had come straight from a meeting with Biden and other world leaders.
He then threw in a moment of acted humility as he spoke of paying his fine, reading to keep his eyes occupied rather than looking up to offer his ‘sorry’ while allowing the House and the public to evaluate the congruence of his message by staring into the most telling body part, i.e. the eyes.
He spoke with a pause in between each word to suggest solemnity but, like a train pulling out of a station, he started to gather speed, evoking the name Putin as the second slice of bread in the sandwich, implying he had finished his apology and moved onto other, bigger things.
Red-faced and using his thatch of hair to act as a shield to his face, even he sounded bashful about the obvious deflection of subject-matter. As Starmer pebble-dashed him with insults and accusations, Boris Johnson ’s head seemed to sink even lower into his shoulders but his eyes when he looked up at the leader of the opposition performed pin-point stare that his rapid blink-rate and eye-stutter did little to conceal.
His body language became incongruent as he tried to nod in some form of empathy with the tragic example Starmer told of a man whose wife had died during the pandemic, but after another apology ‘once again’ (suggesting he might be getting tired of wearing the hair shirt) he pulled straight back to the Ukraine and his phrase ‘get on with the job’.
