As I watched Boris Johnson grind through his response to Sue Gray’s interim report in the Commons yesterday afternoon — his irritation mounting, his brief statement of contrition long supplanted by visible defiance, his exasperation far outweighing his capacity to listen — I was reminded of famous words from another century.
The words, in fact, of the US Army chief counsel, Joseph Welch, to Senator Joseph McCarthy, in June 1954: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
For, amidst all the talk of who partied when, how much of Gray’s final report we would eventually see, which festivities the Prime Minister had or had not attended, simple decency was, in all that he said and in his every gesture and expression of clear frustration, horribly conspicuous by its absence.
“I get it and I will fix it,” he declared. But the whole point is that he absolutely does not “get it” — as he went on to reveal. “I want to say to the people of this country,” Johnson continued, “I know what the issue is: it is whether this government can be trusted to deliver and I say yes we can be trusted, yes we can be trusted to deliver.”
But that is not the issue at all. In a single sentence, he explained, inadvertently, why we have reached this tawdry pass. For this Prime Minister, the practise of leadership is not civic, or patriotic, or moral, but strictly transactional.
So his message to the voters was: look, I understand that this all looks a bit fishy, and I have probably messed up a bit, but you and I know that I can produce the goods, and if we can all just get past this tedious inquisition and priggishness, I can carry on being brilliant on your behalf. Okay?
Which is why, quite extraordinarily, Johnson’s supposed apology quickly morphed into a spectacularly inappropriate speech about the merits of Brexit and (I still can’t quite believe it) freeports.
Worse even than this boilerplate boosterism, he contrived to present himself as, implicitly, the victim of it all: let down by the unreformed civil service and supposedly substandard advisers and inept officials who, he implied, were responsible for this terrible culture in No 10.
In answer to many questions from MPs, he repeated the line: we must wait for the full report, we must wait for the Metropolitan police to complete their investigations, we must be patient.
That, of course, was insulting enough: yes, there was no smoking gun in Gray’s “update” but there was a detailed inventory of the weaponry that she is primed and ready to reveal when no longer gagged by the Met’s inquiry. When Gray wrote that there had been “a serious failure to observe…the standards expected of the entire British population at the time”, she also got to the heart of the matter.
This was never about parties, or drink, or cake, but something much more profound and precious: the idea that we are all equal before the law, and that this equality is one of the most fundamental bonds that holds us together, especially in a time of crisis.
This is why the defence that Johnson got the “big decisions” right is not only factually questionable but morally outrageous. What decision could possibly be bigger than the decision of millions of Britons during lockdown to obey the law and sacrifice everyday contact with friends and families, not to see or hug those they loved, not, in the worst cases, to be with them when they died?
That, Prime Minister, is why you have to go. The people of this country proved equal to the task — and you did not. On the contrary, you revealed, yet again, that you think you are special, different, exempt, better. And the time has come to let you know, in action not words, that you are most definitely not.
Let us not fixate too heavily upon the present indecision of the Conservative Party; their failure — so far — to send in 54 letters demanding a confidence vote in Johnson’s leadership. It is indeed impossible to put a precise time frame on his exit, but yesterday’s disgraceful performance has foreshortened the time he has left in office.
He will not go readily, or with dignity. His fingernails will have to be prised from the door frame of No 10. But he is on his way out. That was what his performance yesterday ensured: that, in the end, and however messily, decency will prevail.
