(they have got away with it)
As partygate reaches its encore, the Tory-backing press is playing the same old songs.
“Is that it?” The Daily Mail’s headline huffs today, arguing that because the Sue Gray report did not feature images of the Boris Johnson dressed as Bacchus reclining in a bath of red wine purchased from the Westminster branch of Tesco Express, it’s much ado about nothing and ‘we’ should all move on.
The demand to “move on” is echoed by The Sun on its front page (The Party (Gate) Is Over) which features pantomime criticism of the Prime Minister (“…now help our readers through desperate cost of living crisis.”), while minimising the report’s findings with an inside spread headlined Most criminal thing about this party is that it looks rubbish.
As is now traditional, The Sun’s stories avoid any mention of James Slack, now the paper’s deputy editor but then the Number 10 head of communications whose leaving-do on the night before Prince Philip’s funeral was one of the bashes covered in Grey’s small tome of tut-tutting. How slack of them…
Sun political editor Harry Cole writes:
Boris Johnson was once branded “the albino greased piglet” because of his remarkable ability to slip out of trouble. As the dust settles on Sue Gray’s marathon probe, it looks like the lucky swine has escaped the butcher’s knife once again.
Putting aside the lazy use of David Cameron’s “piglet” quote again — you’d think that particular Prime Minister would be more circumspect about pork-based analogies — Cole’s line ignores that the section of the press that he represents is letting Boris Johnson “slip out of trouble” again. Were he not a man who The Sun still believes it can do business with, Gray’s report would be treated as much more damning.
The paper’s leader column (“Now let it go”) shows how willing it is to contort itself into making excuses for Johnson:
How much Boris was aware of is hard to know. Much of it happened in his absence. some of the Gray report, he said, came as news to him yesterday. And while he rightly accepted responsibility as the man at the top it is worth recalling what else he had on his plate:
A once-in-a-century pandemic which nearly killed him. Getting Britain vaccinated. The early stages of Brexit. His vital levelling up agenda. Was he also meant to police hundreds of staff?
The answer to that last question is “yes”. And perhaps the Prime Minister’s well-documented disregard for his government’s own rules might have played a role in that near-death brush with Covid.
Swinging back to The Daily Mail, we find Richard Littlejohn offering his usual howling under the headline This tedious Toytown witch-hunt proves there’s nothing so ridiculous as the political class in a fit of morality. Florida condo-dweller Dick’s defence of the Prime Minister is hardly flattering:
Earlier this year, I compared Boris to Young Mr Grace in Are You Being Served? I can just imagine him making a morale-boosting appearance at a staff leaving-do, with Carrie on his arm in a skimpy nurse’s uniform and telling his troops: ‘You’ve all done very well…’ before repairing upstairs for tiffin.
It’s a grim insight into Littlejohn’s fantasy world and boils down to him suggesting that the Prime Minister is as incapable as an ageing invalid.
At the bottom of Littlejohn’s column readers are promised “a very different view” from Stephen Glover later in the paper. The Mail enjoys pretending that it’s a platform for debate between its writers rather than a very shallow paddling pool but Glover’s column is very much from the “in sorrow rather than anger” school of rhetoric.
Beneath the headline The natural Cavalier forgot Covid cast him in the role of a Roundhead and I fear he’ll never recover, Glover claims to be neither “Boris-hater or Boris-lover” but a representative of “the rest of us” who:
… accept regretfully that Boris has told untruths throughout his life. We know he repeatedly betrayed his second wife, Marina. We can see that he is — like many journalists, by the way — a poor administrator with a short attention span. We don’t entirely trust him.
Nonetheless, we believe he has a spark of political genius. We admire his brio and energy. Most of us are grateful that he led us out of the EU. We think that when he sets his mind to it — as with Ukraine and the Covid vaccine rollout — he can be a force for good despite his managerial shortcomings.
That word “we” is really working overtime there. What I see is journalism class solidarity from Glover — who was, after all, a co-founder of The Independent with Carrie Johnson’s father Matthew — and despite the bulk of the column being made up of criticisms of Johnson, it still ends with him hoping he’s wrong because he “wants [Johnson] to succeed.”
In The Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson’s once and future home, Allister Heath delivers one of his traditional horror stories for home counties reactionaries Tory Britain faces extinction at the hands of a radical hard-Left alliance. Please, Allister, don’t threaten us with a good time.
Heath also reveals himself once again to be a fantasist disappointed that the real Boris Johnson doesn’t quite live up to his reactionary wet dreams:
… Johnson was meant to be an anti-establishment candidate. Unlike other PMs who deferred to technocrats, Eurocrats or paternalistic do-gooders, he was supposed to be relentlessly focused on the preferences of Middle England: Brexit, a war on crime, the end of the tyranny of Left-wing judges, genuinely controlled migration and an improved health service.
It’s a song that Heath has been singing since long before Sue Gray became an unlikely household name. He wants a Prime Minister as equally spittle-flecked as he is and this is just another opportunity to call for one to be installed.
Elsewhere on the same page, William Sitwell — who I was assured had been cancelled — offers up a column headlined There’s nothing wrong with drinking at work. He burbles on about Churchill being permanently pissed, Pitt the Younger’s penchant for port, and blames “woke millennials” for something or other, which is a requirement if you want to get your invoice paid by today’s Telegraph.
The paper’s leader column — its official voice — puts on its stern patrician act, calling for “strength and competence” but after several hundred words of grumbling, it still manages to find some doubt with which to benefit good ol’ Boris:
Doubtless many will see much of this as froth and bubble when measured against the real issues facing the country, notably the cost of living crunch, rampant inflation and a crisis in Europe.
This is a time for strong leadership and competent government, twin values which the country has traditionally expected the Tories to provide. Mr Johnson now has to show he can still deliver both.
One of the most striking lines in the Grey report was a message written by Johnson’s former principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, which read:
Best of luck - a complete non-story but better than them focusing on our drinks (which we seem to have got away with).
For all the performative disapproval in the Tory press, the calls to move on suggest that they have got away with it again. Watch how quickly the wagons move on.
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