Since 2015, Boris Johnson told an antsy House of Commons at prime minster’s questions, “We’ve done more to resettle vulnerable people than any other European country”. It didn’t make sense, so perhaps it was a mistake. Poland has taken 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees, Hungary has taken 190,000, Germany 50,000. By Tuesday, we’d taken 300. Maybe he didn’t mean Ukrainians, because he hadn’t refreshed his browser? Maybe he meant Syrians, 621,000 of whom were given sanctuary by Germany; 29,000 by the UK. Nope. Or maybe he said it by accident? But then he said it again, and again. Could it have been a straight lie? A dicey move, in parliament.
Not exactly: he was referring to the number of people taken in under a resettlement scheme over the past seven years, in which the UK numbers do surpass other nations’. Overall, our figures are absolutely dwarfed by even much smaller neighbours.
The same old prime minister arrived in parliament, in other words, with the same old manoeuvre of turning something technically true into an untruth by stripping it of context. But it’s not the same old world any more. When you stand up and deliberately mislead, call the worst the best, turn facts on their head, it all sounds a bit Putin-esque.
He had another couple of lines – that he didn’t believe in letting refugees in without checks, and that Conservatives must be humane and have sanctuary in their blood, because look how many on its frontbench were descended from refugees. Those were both weaker, but less murderous-dictator-adjacent.
So many members, from so many parties, stood up to challenge Johnson on the UK’s response to the refugee crisis. The SNP’s Ian Blackford gave a persuasive and workmanlike rundown of how far short we were falling. Ed Davey got Johnson on the hop, as he found himself rattling through the UK visa centres in eastern Europe, muffling one city into another in frantic underenunciation. One of the most affecting speakers was from the Tory benches, Julian Smith, whose voice quavered slightly as he asked when his own party was going to show some humanity.
Keir Starmer went another way, as they say in casting: the chancellor’s measures on fuel bills were nothing like enough to meet the situation, so “when will the prime minister force the chancellor to U-turn?” It was a peculiar angle, dispersing the fault between Johnson and Sunak, and ham-fistedly obvious about not expecting an answer.
But it transpired to be just some fancy footwork before his main attack: BP has made £9.5bn out of prices that were surging even before Ukraine, and Shell made £14bn, “in their own words”, said Starmer, “more money than they know what to do with”. His call for a windfall tax on energy company profits is probably as close to popular radicalism as he’s prepared to sail.
Johnson replied that, if you tax these corporations, they will just pass that cost on to the consumer. It was ironic that they had a pointless barney about nuclear power right after (a leader who has built no nuclear power stations, accusing an opponent who’s never been in government of failing to build nuclear power stations). That answer on windfall tax – what’s the point of taxing companies, when the consumer will always pay? – is radioactive for Johnson.
It will sound worse and worse, as fuel bills rise. Perhaps it was because he realised this that Johnson started mangling his words, or perhaps in some corner of his limbic brain, he thought that accelerating his speech would make the time go faster. He figured out eventually that it was the other way around. Starmer has found a laddish mojo in his responses, all “come off it” and “does he expect us to buy that?”
Two questions from Johnson’s backbenchers were downright peculiar. Greg Clark, the MP for Tunbridge Wells, asked if the prime minister would like to join him in wishing a happy birthday to the second world war veteran Colin Bell. Why yes, Boris Johnson would love to do that. His answer was so baggy, his relief so audible, he sounded a breath away from launching into the song.
Richard Holden, the MP for North West Durham, wanted to know whether, when his constituency’s new cottage hospital was built, the prime minister would grant him the honour of opening it? It’s nothing new for a backbench chancer in a hurry to lob an asinine question to give some rhetorical respite to a flailing leader, but these were on a whole new level, reaching for desperate patriotic bass notes, promising photo ops and, who knows, maybe a dressing up opportunity, as if dealing with a … well, maybe not an autocrat: but autocrat-adjacent.
