Cometh the hour, disappeareth the man. You’d have thought that wild horses wouldn’t have kept Rishi Sunak away from the Commons for the debate on the privileges committee report on Boris Johnson. After all, Sunak had promised when he took office in October last year that he would govern with integrity, accountability and professionalism. And since then we’ve all been waiting for a sign. The smallest nod that he had meant what he said.
And here was the perfect opportunity. The most binary choice imaginable. Boris Johnson had been definitively found to have lied and lied and lied again. To parliament. To the country. To just about everyone he had ever met. Lying is what he does. What he always has done. Quite why it took so many MPs so long to realise what had been blindingly obvious to some of us for years and years is another question. But hey! They got there in the end. Just rejoice at that.
So Rish! had the simplest of tasks to establish his moral credibility. Just turn up to parliament and vote to accept the report’s findings. Of a committee parliament had elected with a Conservative majority. He didn’t even have to speak. How difficult was that? This could have been integrity in action. A physical recognition that a proven liar was a proven liar. The sort of thing that barely requires the memory of a conscience. And Rish! is an honourable man. Hell, he’s told us so often enough.
Only come the big day, there was no sign of Sunak. Yet again, when push comes to shove, he had gone missing in action. The first sign of his impending cowardice came when he phoned Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday morning to assure him that nothing had changed since last week and that the UK was still fully behind Ukraine. A sure sign the prime minister was desperate to look busy. He always calls Zelenskiy when he’s feeling guilty.
Next we were told Rish! just had to meet the Swedish prime minister in the afternoon. Even though he couldn’t remember who the Swedish prime minister was or why he had to see him. Maybe he could invent an imaginary trade deal that no one was going to agree. Just as long as the meeting took place some time late in the afternoon.
Then there was the evening speech to a charity. That had taken some arranging. A global email to all organisations to see if anyone wanted a prime minister to talk to them that evening. And he wasn’t even going to charge for it. The deal of the century. There had been only the one taker. But one was all he needed. His diary was officially full. It had taken some ingenuity. That just left a bit of time to have a pedicure and take the dog to the groomer’s. Essential government business.
And that was the last we saw of honesty, integrity and accountability. Sunak had failed at the lowest possible hurdle. There would have been some virtue if he had been able to tell the truth. That he was doing everything possible to stay away because he was too timid to risk upsetting Johnson and his supporters.
But they are too few on the ground for Johnson to risk mobilising in case anyone noticed his sinking popularity. Just Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadine Dorries and a few other losers. But Rish! couldn’t even manage that. In his desperation to remain invisible, he had been seen by everyone for what he was. A fraud. A man too weak to stand up for himself against Johnson.
Rish! wasn’t the only one to go missing in action. Michael Gove had retreated to his department’s roof, trying to square his lack of backbone with his imagined virtue. Something only drugs can achieve. Jeremy Hunt was nowhere to be seen. He never is these days. Not even Suella Braverman could be bothered to hang around and she had just given a ministerial statement in the previous business.
So the government frontbench consisted of just Penny Mordaunt. Someone had to do it, but she did it with style. She accepted the committee, she accepted the report and would vote for it. She also took a swipe at Johnson’s dishonourable honours list.
Much of the rest of the debate quickly fell into a pattern. Opposition MPs – including Harriet Harman, the privileges committee chair – forensically went through Johnson’s history of lying. The contempt for parliament. Worse still, the contempt for the country. People had obeyed the rules, relatives had died alone. Johnson not so much. It would be hard to think of a worse prime minister in living memory. Or at all.
The Tory benches were sparsely populated. It wasn’t just Rish! that was running scared. Not even Andy Carter, Bernard Jenkin and Alberto Costa – three of the Conservative members of the committee – could be bothered to show their faces. But some, like Theresa May, were vocal in their support for the committee. Not so long ago she was a deadbeat prime minister. Now she sounds like a parliamentary colossus. We live in desperate times.
Johnson wasn’t totally bereft of support. Rees-Mogg attacked Harman’s bias – something she convincingly refuted – while Lia Nici was positively deranged. She said that she had been a parliamentary private secretary to Boris which made her a neutral in the game. And she was adamant there hadn’t been any parties because Johnson had assured her of this.
But at least there was an honesty to Rees-Mogg and Nici. They were wrong but they were prepared to defend their man in their speeches, even if they didn’t follow through by voting against the report. Not so all those other Tories who were going to abstain. They knew Johnson was lying but couldn’t bring themselves to act on it or speak out on his behalf. Labour was determined to flush them out. To force a vote. Come the next election their shame should not be forgotten.
• This article was amended on 20 June 2023 to remove wording indicating that Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lia Nici had voted against the committee’s report; in fact neither recorded a vote.
