The Farce of the Red Death

How the Truth Finally Caught up with the Clown Prince

Government, in a democratic country at least, is a serious and sober business, or at least it should be. I mean seriousness and sobriety should be qualities that every elected government should aim for, regardless of their political persuasion. Never having been in government myself, I can only make this observation from afar, but that is the position that most of us will ever make such observations from.

Such distance is built into democracy. In a country like the United Kingdom, with a population of sixty-seven million people, many of whom do not and never will think alike, we vote for politicians from a long way away, and hope or believe that the trust we have been placed in them will be repaid by truth, honesty, and at least an attempt at competence, coupled with a willingness to admit that mistakes have been made and rectify them if possible.

I recognize that this is only an ideal, and it isn’t always achieved. I remember very well the speech that Tony Blair gave to the House of Commons in March 2003, when he defended the invasion of Iraq that had already been decided upon, with the characteristic veneer of seriousness that concealed the essential shallowness and recklessness of the entire undertaking. Blair, like Anthony Eden before him, may well have believed his own lies, or at least rationalised them to himself as necessary instruments of raison d’état.

We will all have our own particular memories of moments when such trust was breached, or when we believed it was. And yet there was a time when even the shadiest politicians were expected to pay lip service to this ideal, regardless of whether they always lived up to it. Because without it, the whole basis of democratic government collapses.

Why would you vote for a prime minister who you know is lying, not only to you, but to the democratic institutions intended to hold the executive to account? Isn’t this why parliament exists? And would the point of democratic politics even be, if anyone could lie at any time, to whoever they wanted, and never pay a price for it?

Once again, I recognise that there have been occasions when politicians have lied and have got away with it, and yet I insist that trust and trustworthiness remain as essential ideals, without which, even halfway decent government becomes impossible.

I say this, at a time when the single greatest liar in British history has finally been forced to stand naked, as Bob Dylan once put it, and not in his own or someone else’s bedroom, but in full view of the country that he treated with a contempt unmatched by any other prime minister.

Sometimes good or simply halfway decent politicians are undone by circumstances outside their control, which lead them to take poor decisions taken in the midst of wars, invasions, financial crises and so on. It’s entirely fitting that Johnson was undone not by the unexpected turn of historical events, but by precisely the qualities on which his entire career was based: the ability to lie, cheat, distract and deflect.

Many people have known this for a long time, and too many chose to ignore it. In the early nineties Johnson lied about the European Union to create a political identity for himself as a maverick outsider. His lies helped swing the 2016 referendum. He lied in order to become PM in 2019. And, as the Parliamentary Committee of Privileges argued with unprecedented force and indignation, he lied repeatedly to parliament itself.

The lies he told are not ‘lies of state’. This is not Suez or Iraq. Johnson lied to conceal the fact that he and his staff routinely got pissed, shagged, and vomited in Downing Street at precisely the moment when he and his government were telling the population, in one sombre warning after another, that we should be doing the opposite of that; when bereaved and devastated people across the country could not even say goodbye to their loved ones on their deathbeds, or attend their funerals.

So all this is as fitting an outcome as anyone could imagine, and if Johnson is a victim, he is entirely the victim of his own moral squalor. He and his inner circle arrogated for themselves the rights that they instructed everybody else to forgo, and one of these rights was the right to party, in 2020, as if it was 1999, or a 1980s Bullingdon Club gathering. They did this, because their leader told them to do it or did nothing to stop it. And not because they were tragic heroes or great villains, but because, like their leader, they were shallow, selfish, and ultimately pitiful people who believed that they could act however they liked without any consequences.

Boris Johnson’s House of Fun

If you don’t accept this - and amazingly there still people that don’t, read the Privileges Committee report. Bear in mind that the report only considers four of the mildest parties, not the more sordid Bullingdon/Hellfire Club grand bouffes, or the routine rulebreaking described by the ‘Downing Street whistleblower’ who told the Independent:

Inside No 10 was like an island of normality; nothing had changed since 2018, we were all operating as if there was no pandemic. It was utterly ridiculous. It was so widely accepted that we were all breaking the rules that we would receive operational notes from security to be aware that a camera crew were outside, and to remember to stay 2m apart when in front of the cameras. Huge efforts were made to make sure staff were playing up to the cameras – clearly these instructions had come from the top.

What fun they had, these gilded parasites in Johnson’s House of Fun, taking off their masks on trains and putting them back on when they arrived at a station. They deejayed, shagged, and vomited on the stairs. They karaoked Abba and passed out under their desks. They twirled awkwardly to the Pogues in their Christmas jumpers and joked about the rules they were breaking.

Bliss was it in that pandemic to be alive, but to be a Johnson staffer was very heaven. While these pampered buffoons cosplayed The Farce of the Red Death, most of the population had confined themselves to their homes, or took part in ‘socially distanced’ gatherings in their gardens for the best part of two years, in an exemplary demonstration of discipline and solidarity.

If British governments have sometimes been dishonest or economical with the truth, rarely, if ever, has government been so tawdry and degenerate. And all this is entirely due to the smirking charlatan, the bring your own booze man, the birthday party boy who loved his staff - or was it himself? - so much that he just had to raise their morale with a glass of water while he carried the nation’s burdens on his back. And all the time, he believed that he was ‘obeying the rules’ or ‘following the guidance.’

This is how Johnson repeatedly presented himself to his parliamentary peers, and last week a cross-party committee with a Tory majority refused to believe him. Not only did the committee conclude that Johnson lied to parliament repeatedly before the committee was even constituted, but it has also found him guilty of conspiring to discredit and undermine the committee itself, in a judgment that ought to be written on billboards across the country:

We have concluded above that in deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt. The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the Prime Minister, the most senior member of the government. There is no precedent for a Prime Minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House. He misled the House on an issue of the greatest importance to the House and the public, and did so repeatedly. He declined our invitation to reconsider his assertions that what he said to the House was truthful. His defence to the allegation that he misled was an ex post facto justification and no more than an artifice. He misled the Committee the presentation of his evidence.

At this point, it’s tempting to echo the 1966 World Cup final commentary, ‘They think it’s all over, it is now’, as far as Johnson’s calamitous political journey is concerned.

Except that it isn’t. And not only because the Great Liar has refused to accept the committee’s verdict. Or because he was so convinced of his own righteousness that he resigned as an MP rather than attempt to defend himself. Or because he called the committee a ‘kangaroo court’ and conspired to discredit its members. Or even because he gave peerages to the same staffers who broke the rules and helped him cover up the fact that they were being broken.

It’s not even because Johnson now has a reputed £1 million a year contract with the Daily Mail. As martyrdoms go, this isn’t quite on the level of Edmund Campion, and ‘witch-hunts’ have tended to result in more deleterious outcomes.

All this is to be expected, because this what Johnson is like, and has always been like. But as always the significance of Johnson goes far beyond the man himself. On Monday, 225 MPs abstained or stayed away from the parliamentary debate on whether to accept the Privileges Committee’s recommendations.

Many of them have been, and still are, all over television or social media like an angry rash, telling us to ‘move on’, or accusing Johnson’s detractors of focusing on trivia. Most of them have been amplifying Johnson’s ‘witch-hunt’ victim narrative. Some have cast aspersions on Bernard Jenkin, Sue Gray, Harriet Harman, and even - get this - the nurses who posted TikTok videos during the pandemic.

It takes a strong stomach to see nurses being placed on the same level as Johnson’s crazy gang. Or contemplate Brexiter politicians who once claimed to be standing up for the sovereignty of parliament, refusing to appear in parliament to take part in a debate because they knew they would lose it. You can remind them again and again that this is not a debate about ‘cake’, or even parties, but about the contempt of parliament that followed, but you might as well bang your head against a wall with the likes of Brendan Clarke-Smith, Lucy Allan, or Jacob Greased-Hogg.

On one hand this is pure disreputable cowardice - they take after their leader in this respect. No surprise that the chatbot-prefect Rishi Sunak was one of them; a damp J-cloth has more backbone. The same man who promised a new era of integrity in government refused to revisit Johnson’s sordid honours list, and then failed to turn up in the House of Commons to vote on a parliamentary report which turned on the central issue of… integrity in government.

Sunak may have done this because he is personally implicated in Johnson’s rulebreaking, and also because he is politically weak, and frightened of what Johnson’s trollish MPs might do to him. His attempts to placate Johnson’s pitchfork mob are unlikely to bring him any favours, because these are people who hate him anyway, and want their ‘top man’ back in the Big Job.

Many of Johnson’s absent supporters didn’t appear because Johnson told them not to - a tactical move motivated by Johnson’s political interests as well as their own cowardice. Unable to win the debate or even participate in it, the cultisits attempted to cast legitimacy on the vote - and ultimately on parliament itself - by leaving gaps on the benches.

If parliament was not going to do what they wanted, they would ‘boycott’ parliament. It makes a kind of sense. And it’s also a demonstration of Johnson’s continued toxic power. Because when push comes to shove, many of these MPs clearly prefer the sovereignty of Johnson to the sovereignty of parliament, and some of them undoubtedly prefer him to the Tory Party itself.

If - or should it be when? - the most successful political party in the western world receives the electoral decimation it deserves - some of these cultists may form the basis for a new political ‘national conservative’ formation, with Johnson and even Farage at its helm. Or they may seek to complete a Republican Party-style extremist takeover over the already-existing party that will take it even further to the right. Some of them, in their delirium, are already muttering darkly about ‘true conservatism’ as they contemplate a life in the political wilderness.

Whether any of these attempts succeed is another matter. The adulation of Johnson has always tended to exaggerate his supposedly charismatic political appeal. Beyond this moral ruin of a party, millions of people who didn’t see through Johnson’s act before, now understand exactly what he is.

When the time comes, in Uxbridge and beyond, we can only hope that they remember not just the parties that he held, but the party that put him there. Perhaps then, we can begin to take government seriously again. Perhaps we might look more closely at the clapped-out institutions that placed an amoral clown in the highest office in the land.

In the meantime, there is some satisfaction to be taken from the spectacle of the great greased pig for whom there were never any consequences for anything, no longer hanging from a zip-wire waving a union jack, but hoisted entirely by his own petard, where everyone outside the cult can see exactly what he is, and what he has always been.