It’s normal practice for a prime minister to report back to the House at the first available opportunity on returning from an overseas trip. So you’d have thought Boris Johnson would have been keen to make a statement to the Commons about last week’s Indian adventure.
Both to tell stories of how he bravely forgot to mention India’s neutrality towards Russia in its war on Ukraine during his meeting with the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and of a country in which he isn’t universally disliked and mistrusted.
But The Convict thought better of it. He used to regard the Commons as his natural habitat. An environment in which he was guaranteed to get the love and laughter that he craves. Now it’s a symbol of his disgrace. An unwelcome reminder of his dishonesty. A sore that can never begin to heal until either he does the decent thing and resigns or his fragile ego crumbles under the weight of his lies.
The only MPs to even pretend to believe a word he says these days are the spineless ministerial apparatchiks, now engaged in a constant internal struggle between abject denial and cognitive dissonance – think the junior culture minister Chris Philp, who has yet to find an arse he didn’t want to brown-nose and who had sworn blind on national television on Monday morning that it was entirely plausible that Johnson and Nadine Dorries could have independently sent identical tweets: how little self-worth must you have to do that? – and fawning halfwitted sycophants, such as Micky Fabricant. The rest either confront The Convict head on, either openly laughing or spitting with rage at his deceit, or maintain a silence laced with contempt.
So instead of staying in Westminster, thanking his lucky stars that he hadn’t yet received a second fixed-penalty notice for the party in which the empties and the stragglers had been picked out of the flowerbeds, Johnson had headed north to Bury.
Quite what he was doing there was anyone’s guess. According to Number 10, he was campaigning for the local elections. But as most councillors now concede that he is a liability, the only thing he can have been campaigning for is to increase the number of Tory losses next week.
After kicking a football aimlessly at Bury FC, Johnson did a pool clip for the lunchtime news. Inevitably, most questions focused on his reaction to the previous day’s Mail on Sunday article in which a Tory MP had claimed Angela Rayner tried to distract Johnson at prime minister’s questions by crossing and uncrossing her legs.
The Convict said he was furious. Not only had a woman never managed to put him off his stride in the past – he had maintained his laser-like focus even when Jennifer Arcuri had been pole-dancing in front of him – but such misogyny had no place in his Tory party.
“If we ever find who is responsible for it,” he said, “I don’t know what we will do, but they will be the terrors of the Earth.”
This sounded very much like a quote from King Lear. A subject on which Johnson may yet become an expert if he ever gets round to employing a researcher to write most of the Shakespeare biography for which he has trousered a reported £800k advance.
Though he might now be wishing he had chosen his Lear more carefully. The extract he referenced is from when Lear is in the process of going mad and losing his kingdom. Who knows, within a few days he might take to walking naked on the heath. Then the emperor really will have no clothes.
It also wasn’t entirely clear just how seriously Johnson was taking the Rayner claims. He did at least manage not to smirk as he condemned those who had briefed the story but The Convict himself has form for sexism and misogyny.
Just think of his descriptions of women beach volleyball players at the 2012 Olympics as “glistening like wet otters” and women in burkas as “letterboxes”. Or that women who voted Tory would have bigger breasts. Even when he’s seemingly not to blame, he’s still a liability. His weight of baggage is just too heavy.
One person who was taking this seriously was the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, who began proceedings in the Commons by saying he had arranged a meeting with the editor of the Mail on Sunday to discuss the matter.
We then moved on to Home Office departmental questions. A rather bloodless affair, which had the feel of everyone going through the motions in the run-up to another week’s recess before the state opening of parliament.
Still, even an only semi-engaged Priti Patel is plenty vicious and stupid enough to provide some entertainment. She sat proudly beside Tom Pursglove, a junior Home Office minister who might possibly be dimmer than she is – even between them both they can’t supply a connecting synapse – only to stand up to once more declare Rwanda to be an African paradise.
If there was a problem with her asylum seeker policy it was that the Channel would be overcrowded with refugees coming over in search of a free air ticket. And anyone who questioned Rwanda’s human rights record was just racist.
It was when she got to the costs that she became seriously deranged. It wasn’t up to her to tell the Commons how much the scheme would cost, she insisted. It was up to the opposition parties to come up with different proposals. Though if she had listened, she would have realised they had.
But by now, Priti Vacant was off on one. Labour shouldn’t care about what the scheme costs as they had said it was unworkable. So it wouldn’t cost the taxpayer anything anyway. She paused to give her own benches a knowing look. She genuinely thought it was a “Gotcha” moment. There is no hope for us.
