This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Good afternoon. Boris Johnson is a liar. After 14 months of investigating, irrefutable evidence gathered by seven of his peers and laid out across 106 pages shows 53 uses of the word “misled”, 10 uses of the word “disingenuous” and a stone cold conclusion that Johnson, a former prime minister, committed “repeated contempts” of Parliament over lockdown-busting parties before being complicit in a campaign of abuse and intimidation.
For all the noise surrounding the Privilege Committee’s findings, the kangaroo court slurs and the ‘show trial’ allegations, the take-home is that a man who was supposed to uphold the integrity of the House actually brought it into disrepute. That was the conclusion published for all to see and that’s what an overwhelming number of MPs voted through in Parliament while Johnson loyalists ran for the hills. Just seven voted against the report’s conclusions while 225 Tory MPs – the PM included – didn’t bother to turn up. So much for “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level of the government”.
Rishi Sunak’s absence can easily be explained away if you wish to believe that the whole matter was just a political hot potato he wanted to avoid. Yet dig a little deeper and you will find that he is actually guilty of the exact same offence. In December 2021, the former chancellor told the House of Commons that he “did not attend any parties”, despite subsequently receiving a fixed penalty notice from the Metropolitan Police for lockdown breaches. Sunak isn’t on the line for repeated offences, admittedly, and he certainly cuts a cleaner figure than Johnson. But a fib is a fib when it comes to parliamentary matters, and to paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk, sticking feathers up your arse does not make you a chicken.
See, truth telling in parliament used to matter. But what we’ve witnessed over the past few years is a degradation of the truth to the point where it is hard to know what to believe. During the Brexit referendum, numerous vote-winning claims were made that have since been proven to be completely fallacious, and they were peddled by the people who ended up in charge of the country. When I hear people criticise others for backing Brexit because it would mean money for the NHS I think, why shouldn’t they have believed that? A man that would become the future prime minister stood beside a bus and nailed his colours to it. Surely that’s enough to give it credence?
Yet that lie, along with many others, laid the foundations of what became a culture of lying within government with Boris Johnson at the top of the pile. This week marks the start of what promises to be a long fight back for the truth.
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