IT’S odd that Boris Johnson should be so aghast to see written down what many of us have been saying for years: that he was a lying liar of a Prime Minister who held the citizens he was elected to serve and the parliament he affected to revere in contempt.

Until now, those opinions - voiced by the little people who obeyed the rules he flouted - glanced off him like pellets off a power station. Those rules were never meant for the likes of him: a man born to lead, not follow, even when it came to the diktats of his own government.

Like Donald Trump, he assumed himself untouchable, impervious to criticism or sanctions. Why wouldn’t he when his lack of common decency only bolstered his position, and when the parliamentary system seemed designed to protect his interests at the expense of everyone else’s?

The Herald:

We all witnessed him blithely lying at the despatch box; but to call out those lies from the opposition benches was to risk ejection, as Dawn Butler and Ian Blackford found to their cost.

Brexit was supposed to be a reclaiming of “British values”. Yet Johnson presided over their contamination and perversion. While in past times of crisis, great leaders focused on national morale, he thought no further than the morale of his wife and advisers. JFK claimed Winston Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.

Johnson expended his meagre rhetorical skills not on stirring speeches, but on arguing that black was white: that farewell dos for former colleagues were essential work meetings; and that he wasn’t aware of a late-night gathering in an office he had to pass to reach his flat.

Such is his gift for prevarication that, even as photographic evidence of the rule-breaking mounted, it seemed possible he would escape unscathed.

The privileges committee’s report should mark the beginning of the end of a national gaslighting. Unlike the sycophants who kept Johnson in power so long, its members - four of them Conservatives - were unwilling to buy into his alternative reality: that the gatherings held in Downing Street fell within the rules, or that he believed they did, or that no-one ever suggested to him they might not.

 

Kangaroo Court?

Using words like “cynical” and “disingenuous”, they found the ex-PM had deliberately misled the the House on multiple occasions, that he had been complicit in concerted attempts to undermine the committee’s credibility, and that - on receiving its draft findings - he personally impugned it by decrying it as a “kangaroo court.”

Such actions were a direct attack on democracy, they said. If he hadn’t already taken the easy way out by resigning, they would have recommended a 90-day suspension - the longest since Keith Vaz offered to buy cocaine for male sex workers in 2019, and more than enough to trigger the Recall Act and a by-election.

It was as if the curtain had finally fallen to reveal the Wizard of Oz as a cheap fraud; as if the mind-bending trip we’d all been on was finally ending and we could head on back to Kansas.

We’d be halfway home by now, if, confronted with his offending, Johnson had responded with grace and contrition. Instead, he flounced about like a spoiled child, calling the committee deranged and trading “you’re a liar”, “No *you’re* a liar” insults with its members.

Then - just to show the world no-one tells *him* what to do - he breached the ministerial code again by agreeing to write a weekly column for the Daily Mail without clearing it with the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba). It was a gesture that would have carried more force if his first offering hadn’t been about a weight loss wonder drug.

So, that’s what you’re getting for your six-figure payment, Ted Verity? A sort of toxic Adrian Chiles? Can’t wait for: Large or extra large? My perilous failure ever to buy condoms, and: We can go to the moon; why couldn’t I learn to love the EU?

The Herald:

Meanwhile, like the paralysed inner circle at the start of The Death of Stalin, Johnson’s followers appeared caught between relief at his political demise and the fear he might recover.

A handful went on news programmes to criticise the committee’s “spiteful, vindictive and over-reaching conclusions”. There was talk of a civil war within the party, But given Johnson told then them not to oppose the motion to endorse the report in the Commons tomorrow (monday), we can assume even he doubted the size of the rebellion.

 

Legacy expunged

Failing (ideally) a General Election, what the country needs to bring this awful era to a close is a period of intense deBorisisation. Despite his role in Johnson’s rise (or perhaps because of it) Rishi Sunak ought to be publicly denouncing his predecessor, and working to expunge his legacy.

Yet what was he doing on Thursday morning? Harassing migrants. And what was he doing on Thursday afternoon? Restating Johnson’s right to the nepo-resignation honours list full of cads and charlatans Sunak himself had foolishly approved.

The Herald:

Sunak promised to lead a government with “integrity, professionalism and accountability” but the damage wrought to our democratic institutions by Johnson’s behaviour will be difficult to repair. True, the former PM’s resignation honours list is useful as a rogues gallery; a beginner’s guide to the most contemptible people in public life.

But his determination to reward those who colluded in the culture of lockdown rule-breaking is a celebration of the entitlement that allowed that culture to flourish. How else can the decision to make his former private secretary, Martin “BYOB” Reynolds, a Companion of the Order of the Bath be interpreted, except as a “fuck you” to democratic scrutiny?

But then, one of the great paradoxes of the Johnson era is that a politician who promoted Brexit as a means of restoring parliamentary sovereignty should have spent most of his time in power undermining it. From his unlawful proroguing to his attempt to tear up its anti-sleaze system, he has flaunted his disregard for its authority.

 

Sharing secrets

It’s a disregard he shares with Trump. And now he - like Trump - is at the centre of a security alert, 25 of his notebooks withheld from him after they were found to contain highly sensitive material. Top secret stuff. Perhaps he should have de-classified the information while still Prime Minister so he could splatter them all over his Daily Mail column without compunction.

There is no love lost between Johnson and Sunak these days. The latter appears to be gauging the extent of the divisions within the party before speaking out against him.

But Johnson is a liability. As long as he has a platform, he will use it to bring down his perceived foes and engage in demagoguery. Where there is harmony, he will bring discord.

With that in mind, the risk to Sunak of facing down Johnson’s remaining allies is surely less than the risk of appearing weak: to his cabinet, to Keir Starmer. to the general public. The privileges committee is right when it says its members must be able to “carry out [their] remit from the elected house”, or else those who break the rules will not be held to account.

For the sake of parliament, for the sake of democracy, for the sake of the country, Sunak and his fellow Tory MPs must endorse the committee’s recommendations.

They must condemn Johnson’s behaviour and the behaviour of others who strove to prevent it being exposed. The man is a compulsive liar, a destructive influence, the worst Prime Minister we have ever had. He should never be allowed to hold elected office again.