For a while it looked as if Boris Johnson might have been hiding in a fridge for a second time. Good Morning Britain’s interview with the prime minister had been scheduled to start at 8.15 and by 8.25 there was still no sign of him. Back in the ITV studio, Richard Madeley was having to fill time with a Zoom interview with Patrick Kielty. The Irish comedian and presenter used the dead air to remind everyone that Johnson was a liar so the time wasn’t entirely wasted.
It certainly teed things up nicely for Susanna Reid when a crumpled and pasty-faced Johnson eventually joined her in his Downing Street study just before 8.30. After reminding him that it had been 1,791 days since he had last appeared on GMB, Reid cut to the chase. “Are you honest, prime minister?” she asked. “Yes,” replied the Convict. The interview had run for less than 20 seconds and Johnson had already told his first lie.
Reid gave him a second chance to rethink his answer. Neither she nor Boris seemed to think it at all unusual that the first thing she would want to ask a prime minister after five years was whether he was a liar. Both knew the presumption was that he was. That’s how low we’ve sunk. A country reduced to the level of a shallow narcissist. The Convict blustered, trying to hedge his bets. It wasn’t that he was lying, more that he was a controversialist. In his dreams. He’s just a tired joke that’s no longer funny. A washed up end of the pier act.
Even so, Johnson couldn’t help digging. A man always desperate to go lower still. “I do my best to represent faithfully and accurately what I believe,” he said. This was telling. Both for the admission that the truth does not come easily to him, that at times there is an unbridgeable gap between fantasy and reality in his consciousness, and the implicit acknowledgment that the only cause in which he truly believes is his own survival. And that for him there is a warped nobility in being dishonest in pursuit of that end. Even now he can’t bring himself to admit that he deliberately misled parliament over Partygate. Despite having attended many of the parties himself. That’s not just lying. It’s a pathology.
After a brief dip into Ukraine – Johnson was adamant the Russians were grooming children as sleeper agents, which was why the UK was insisting on visas for all refugees – Reid moved on to the cost of living. The Convict was adamant the government was doing everything it could, apart from the areas in which it could be doing more. He didn’t even appear to notice he had just contradicted himself. So much for his famous Oxford Union debating skills. Rather, he was mostly intent on talking over Reid and trying to wind down the clock on the interview. Even he could see the interview was turning into a car crash and his legs widened further apart the more he tried to mansplain his way out of it.
Reid was not so easily deflected and wondered how Elsie was supposed to get by. Elsie was a 77-year-old pensioner who could now afford to eat only one meal a day and had taken to using her bus pass to ride the buses all day during off-peak hours to keep warm. A hint of recognition from The Convict. “I brought in the Freedom Pass as London mayor,” he chipped in. He hadn’t of course, but the lie was the least of it.
The real giveaway was what this said about Johnson. There was no compassion for Elsie and people like her who were struggling, not just to get by but to stay alive. No sense of duty to or responsibility for the country he professed to serve. Just an eagerness to take the credit for making it possible for pensioners to spend their days keeping warm at the bus company’s expense. As if this was somehow a brilliant government initiative for which the likes of Elsie ought to be grateful. Next up the Convict will be claiming the night tube was designed as accommodation for those who can’t afford heating. The concrete is good for our backs. Lucky, lucky us.
By now Johnson was visibly struggling. Any thoughts of a triumphant, soft pre-elections interview had long since crashed and burned as he ramped up his diversionary tactics. But Reid stayed focused. How much had the carers’ allowance gone up by? Boris hadn’t a clue. And didn’t really care. He just wanted his ordeal to end. But his eagerness to get away only turned the car crash into a multiple pile-up.
Energy companies couldn’t possibly be expected to pay a windfall tax as BP was struggling to get by on £6bn profits from the last quarter. People like Elsie shouldn’t be so greedy. It was time for her to stop wondering what the government could do for her and to start being a bit more altruistic. By eating once every other day, for example. And if she could learn to think of tax rises as tax cuts then she’d have more money to spend and wouldn’t need to waste what was left of her life going backwards and forwards on the South Circular. Most of all, Elsie should understand that 10% inflation was her fault so she should be the one who suffered.
For the last few minutes – when she could get a word in edgeways – Reid reverted to the Convict’s honesty. How come we had a prime minister who was the centre of a one-man crime wave? And why did everyone else who was guilty of breaking the law have to resign when he stayed put? Johnson mumbled something about being proud of what he had achieved – imagine the cognitive dissonance – before Reid called time. “Lorraine’s waiting,” she said.
“Lorraine who?” asked Johnson. For once, this wasn’t an act. He genuinely had no idea who Lorraine Kelly was. It was almost as if he suspected that ITV might have rustled up yet another lover with a paternity suit. The Convict’s days as the self-styled man of the people are long gone. And it will be well more than five years before he agrees to another GMB interview. Where was a fridge when you needed one?
