“I’ve much enjoyed our discussion,” Boris Johnson said at the end of his grilling by the Privileges Committee. This is what a well-brought-up Englishman says as he makes his escape from some completely ghastly event.
For three hours, Johnson had managed to avoid being rude to his persecutors. He had suppressed his gift for ridicule and treated their dreary, repetitive, pettifogging questions with respect.
Now Harriet Harman, who chaired the proceedings, was asking him, in one last demonstration of her committee’s fairness, if there was anything else he wanted to say.
There was nothing else it was expedient for him to say, and what he wanted more than anything was to get out of the room without ruining everything with some parting jibe at the expense of Harman, exactly the kind of stylish, benevolent, self-possessed left-wing woman whose esteem he has striven since his earliest years to win.
As soon as he said he had enjoyed himself, he knew he had been ridiculous, and produced, amid laughter, a more plausible formula: “I genuinely think it’s been a useful discussion.”
Perhaps in a curious way it had. For it had enabled Johnson to explain why he disagreed with what he called “the doctrine of obviousness”.
To his interrogators, it was glaringly obvious, and should have been obvious to him, that the Covid rules were again and again flouted in Number 10. After all, as Charles Walker pointed out, the Metropolitan Police issued 126 Fixed Penalty Notices to people who worked there and attended events which to any normal person looked like parties.
But Johnson responded: “It wasn’t obvious to me that there were problems with some events.” His statements to the Commons that the Covid rules had been followed were, he insisted, entirely sincere.
He looked, with his hunched shoulders, like an angry, vulnerable bear, wounded by the taunts of his persecutors, but determined to deny them the triumph of finishing him off.
Can a bear go pale with anger? From time to time this one did.
The Grimond Room, where the bear-baiting was held, was both too small and too hot. It seemed absurd not to have held this event in the Boothroyd Room, which is several times larger, and where the overflow audience of members of the public was accommodated so they could watch the contest on television.
About a dozen MPs had turned out to support Johnson, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Fabricant, Mark Jenkinson, Scott Benton, Jane Hunt, Marco Longhi and Lia Nici. “Hear, hear, hear, hear, hear,” they said as he sloped in, looking, until he removed his hands from his pockets in the doorway, like a recalcitrant schoolboy obliged to attend some event of which he deeply disapproved.
“Parliament expects pro-active candour,” Harman informed him in her opening remarks. She added that “we leave our party interests at the door of the committee room”, and “Sue Gray is not a witness”.
Gray, by accepting the post of Chief of Staff to Sir Keir Starmer, has ceased to be quite so widely hailed as an impartial authority.
“We have yet to reach our conclusions,” Harman added.
“I am here to say to you hand on heart that I did not lie to the House,” Johnson was soon declaring.
He said there had been “a near universal belief in Number 10 that the rules and guidance were being complied with.”
No one had come and told him otherwise. He made his denials to the Commons in December 2021 that any rules had been broken “in good faith”.
The Covid guidance said social distancing should be maintained “where possible”, those words he insisted were “the operative conditional”, and it was evidently “impossible to have a drill sergeant measuring the distance between us day and night”.
How a drill sergeant would despair of Johnson. Perhaps if he had been to Sandhurst he might have been made to smarten up his appearance, but really he is one of life’s irregulars, an insurgent who descends from the mountains to wreak havoc in the plains, but who, once he had seized the machinery of the British state, could not acquire at sufficient speed the quite different skills, inculcated at the Staff College, which are needed to command regular troops.
Every so often we got a glimpse of Johnson the rebel. Indignation rose in him as he declared that “you may say I was being obtuse or oblivious”, but he knew he had to raise his fellow workers’ morale by addressing them and even raising a glass with them: “I am proud to have given them leadership.”
Sir Bernard Jenkin suggested, after Johnson’s explanations, that if only he’d offered these earlier things might have turned out better: “If you’d said all this at the time in the House of Commons we probably wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Injured innocence was Johnson’s preferred mode. At times he waxed indignant: “People who say we were partying in lockdown simply do not know what they are talking about.”
At other moments he offered himself as a guide to correct form: “It’s customary to say goodbye to people in this country with a toast.”
Most of the gatherings with which he is reproached were to say goodbye to members of staff, but Johnson himself is in no mood to say goodbye.
Some of his supporters have denounced the committee as “a kangaroo court”, and Sir Charles Walker wondered whether Johnson regretted this.
“I deprecate the term you’ve just used,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to repeat it.” He said he is quite sure the committee will reach the correct verdict and exculpate him.
He had refrained, by insulting the referee, from bringing a heavier penalty on himself. He had, indeed, taken the referee so seriously that he arrived with Lord Pannick and about five other lawyers to advise him.
Lovers of the ancient sport of bear-baiting, who are numerous at Westminster, will hope that Johnson can be subjected to further torture, at the end of which he will perish.
From their point of view, this was a distressingly professional defence, which may not provoke, from Harman and her colleagues, very much more in the way of punishment.