Waving a Johnson around in public
Boris Johnson's appearance at the Covid Inquiry found the British press finally ready to admit that Emperor was naked all along.
Previously: Robin and Batman vs. The Deadline of Doom
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In 2013, early in his second term as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson submitted to being profiled by the veteran political documentary maker, Michael Cockerell. Asked whether his acting experience at Eton — getting more laughs by not knowing his lines than actually learning them — had informed his political career, Johnson said:
I certainly think that as a general tactic in life… it is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on. Because the reality may be that you don’t know what is going on but people won’t be able to tell the difference.
The week before Johnson’s two-day appearance at the Covid Inquiry, briefings to tame press outlets suggested the former Prime Minister had prepared for a year to face the questioning. Political hacks with a stenographer’s touch wrote breathlessly about what Johnson would “focus on” at the inquiry as if he were driving proceedings rather than appearing as a witness. He was playing Eton amateur dramatics games.
After the unedifying spectacle of George Osborne revealing details of “disgusting and misogynistic” WhatsApp conversations involving Dominic Cummings as a cheeky little exclusive on his chummy yuk-yuk-fest of a podcast with Ed Balls ahead of their discussion at the inquiry, the chair, Baroness Hallett asked people with access to evidence “to respect the terms on which it [had] been shared”.
Johnson and his team of desperate hangers-on and sycophants inevitably ignored that request; stories with angles favourable to him appeared across the right-wing press, prompting Hallett to deliver what passes for a bollocking in the argot of a former Court of Appeal judge:
I’d like to express my concern about reports in the press over the last few days of the contents of Mr Johnson’s witness statement to the inquiry and what his evidence will be. Until a witness is called and appears at a hearing, or the inquiry publishes the witness’ statement, it’s meant to be confidential between the witness, the inquiry, and the core participants… Failing to respect confidentiality undermined the inquiry’s ability to do its job fairly, effectively and independently.
Ahead of Johnson’s first day of evidence, The Sun’s Deputy Political Editor, Ryan Sabey, ‘wrote’ — a word used here to mean ‘copy and pasted what he was messaged — that the ex-PM would “[say] he got big calls right during the pandemic”. Meanwhile, his colleague, Steven Swinford, at The Times broke out a more expensive thesaurus:
Boris Johnson will claim that he delayed implementing the first lockdown on the advice of Sir Chris Whitty amid concerns that people would tire of the restrictions and flout the rules. The former prime minister’s statement to the Covid inquiry is expected to say that given the “massive disbenefits” of lockdown it was “obviously right” to ensure that it was not implemented too soon.
When it came to curtain up, Johnson’s performance was far less bombastic than the pre-publicity had claimed. He slunk into the building early to avoid protestors, pulling a Grimsby Town FC bobblehat over his tactically unbrushed blonde mop. In the chair, he showed no sign of the claimed ‘months’ of preparation on the first day and could not maintain his air of ersatz humbleness on the second, with the anger that is always roiling beneath the surface of his cartoon presentation emerging several times.
He could have arrived naked save for the GTFC hat covering lil’ Boris and The Daily Telegraph would have found a way to defend him. Allison Pearson — who fetishised Johnson as representing “the health of the nation” when he was hospitalised during the pandemic — delivered a predictably unhinged response:
I really must stop watching the Covid Inquiry, it’s bad for the blood pressure. Even the element of drama is lacking because we all know how this story ends:
Lady Hallett, shaggy blonde bob shaking sorrowfully, will find that chaotic, “shopping-trolley” Boris locked down too late (even though notably un-chaotic Germany only locked down two days earlier than us). Bad Boris also raised commonsense objections to lockdown and refused to keep the population masked and social distancing in perpetuity, as recommended by Susan “Stalin’s Nanny” Michie of the Sage scientific advisory group.
Given the choice between Boris’s hale-fellow magnanimity and Michie’s joyless authoritarianism, I know which I would choose, but that is very much not the preference of this appalling establishment sham.
There are few phrases so beloved of Telegraph columnists than “the establishment”. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been on their privileged perch — Pearson has been a national newspaper columnist for more than 30 years — or that the Telegraph itself is a foghorn for capitalism’s most callous and their political wing, the Conservative Party, they are never “the establishment”. No, that’s some left-wing, vegan, civil servants in North London — nudge nudge — townhouses as well as students, UberEats riders, the trade unions, and anyone who doesn’t tremendously object to Doctor Who.
Madeline Grant, the Telegraph’s sketchwriter — a vestigial position given to the writer most deluded about their hilarity in any newsroom — stuck firmly to the party line, established long before a word of evidence was heard, that the inquiry is pointless and will achieve nothing:
Eventually, Mr Keith moved to the real meat – the curious incident of the disappearing WhatsApps. Mr Johnson feigned ignorance in the manner of a teenager caught viewing porn on the family computer. He professed not to know what a factory reset was, something the KC – surreally – attempted to explain. As it happens, a factory reset is when unnecessary data is wiped and the device returned to the simplest exercise of its original purpose: the inquiry could learn a lot from it.
… Had Mr Johnson done too little, too late? It was obvious, suggested Mr Keith, that Britain needed to pursue a policy of “suppression”. Mr Johnson replied that it would have been “negligent” not to weigh up the impact on lives and livelihoods. As he choked up describing the difficulty of responding to a once-in-a-century catastrophe, I almost felt sorry for him. The inquiry at least was back to its factory setting; a weird mixture of religious inquisition, HR meeting and panto.
The good news (if you’re a lawyer) is that this charade is costing taxpayers more than £1 million a week and will run for years. The bad news for the rest of us? It still won’t get to the bottom of anything.
The chance of a factory reset at Telegraph looks unlikely, as the UAE-backed bid for it trundles on. But that won’t bother moral vacuum and Matt Hancock co-writer, Isabel Oakeshott, who has never met a fee she didn’t like. Her contribution to Covid Inquiry coverage was as predictable as the one from Pearson:
[Johnson] wanted to explore the merit in offering the over 65s a “CHOICE.” He was fascinated by the Swedish experiment with eschewing lockdowns and treated proponents of targeted protection for the most vulnerable with the respect they deserved. Instead of denigrating them as dangerous and irresponsible, in the way his health secretary did, Johnson invited some of the leading voices to Downing Street to make their case.
Unfortunately, the prime minister was simply no match for the combined might of all those around him who showed little to no interest in – still less concern for – the devastating long-term consequences of shutting down society for the best part of 18 months.
With the honourable exception of the then chancellor Rishi Sunak, they all did everything in their power to shut his counter-arguments down.
It would have taken almighty courage; phenomenal strength of character and an extraordinary appetite for risk for any prime minister to face down his Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Officer, Health Secretary, Public Health England, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling and all the other academics and experts with their terrifying predictions of death and destruction if the virus were allowed to run its course.
Whenever he wavered – urging colleagues to weigh up the economic and other health costs of ever harsher lockdowns – he faced an overwhelming onslaught. Those around him were in constant communication with each other about how to make him do what they wanted. When Covid almost killed him, the die was cast. All lockdown fanatics had to do was remind him how close he came to death – and ask whether he wished others to end up in intensive care, gasping for breath?
It’s the usual Telegraph Bizzaro-world logic at work: Up is down; responsible people are truly the irresponsible ones; Boris Johnson was the hero, professionals you may not have heard of were villains undermining his brilliant thinking… and on, and on.
The Johnson family’s very own blonde bombsite Rachel used an appearance on Sky News (along with her LBC show) to argue on her brother’s behalf, claiming the inquiry is a “show trial” engaged in “scapegoating”. For the Telegraph, builderphobic bowtie-fanatic Tim Stanley argued that:
Boris should emulate [Australian media mogul Kerry] Packer [testifying before that country’s parliament] and expose the inquiry for what it is: not a neutral court but the prosecuting body of a class ideology.
Surely not “class ideology”! The Daily Telegraph would never engage in such filth.
Over at The Sunday Times, Camilla Long — just one of a huge surfeit of Camillas in the British press — again goes for the easy establishment (there’s that word again) line on inquiries: They’re expensive and useless so why bother asking questions at all? It’s not a good look for a journalist but Long’s rarely more than adjacent to the truth. She writes in her usual braying style:
What do they do, for the millions we are paying them? (The inquiry, which is so huge it is simply better to think of it as 11 or 12 inquiries rolled into one, will cost £100 million.) Nothing, as far as I can see. It’s such an incredible gig that if I were to die tomorrow I would like to come back as the inquiry’s silky lead counsel Hugo Keith KC, who wafts through the building like human aftershave. His is a dream job for a lawyer — all prosecution; no tough questions. None of what he does is difficult. There are no gotcha moments, no flourishes or legal strategies, no real arguments or requirements for clarity, even truth. Hearings are basically formalised chats. And the net result will be what? Some minor alteration in the way the prime minister talks to the head of Northern Ireland in future crises? Or that social distancing should have been “five metres”? It’s so a charade for our times.
It’s the kind of column that feels like being backed into a corner at some awful party by someone who will Jackson Pollock you with spit and opinions while thinking that they are quite the conversationalist. Again, she makes Johnson — always ‘Boris’ to these people — the de facto hero of the piece:
For Boris, of course, this kind of thing is also easy. All he needed to do was turn up and look contrite. To say the questions were soft was to understate the number of times he had to hold himself back from cracking a joke (Keith: “Nobody’s suggesting you put your feet up at Chevening that week.” Boris: “Apart from you, that is”). He had to keep a straight face, for example, when some hysterically pompous lawyer in a peacock tie said, “I am putting to you some cold steel of evidence.” Or listen to a woman representing Covid victims in Northern Ireland angrily demand “BREVITY” when she herself had asked many, multi-paragraph questions. “Where a one-word answer is sufficient, I’ll take it,” she mewed. Just who are all these people?
Underneath this rhetoric is a belief that people like her and ‘Boris’ should not have to submit themselves to this kind of impertinent questioning.
At The Times, the instant — just add water! — reactions from its columnists showed they were as ready to believe ‘Boris’ as they usually had been when he was in office. Alice Thomson — author of a soppy, adoring profile of Carrie Johnson — wrote:
I think I’m finally over the Boris psychodrama. I’ve got behavioural fatigue. Listening to four hours of the former prime minister’s testimony at the Covid inquiry, I wonder how anyone ever thought he was up to the job — and we haven’t even got on to birthday cakes and suitcases of booze.
There’s a lot of this stuff from journalists at outfits that did rather well out of “the Boris psychodrama”. The Times advocated for Johnson and backed him — just as its more openly loutish sibling The Sun did — way past the point where it was obvious that elevating a habitual liar with morals looser than his baggy suits was a disaster.
Thomson continued:
[Johnson] knew what he wanted to say: that he was sorry, even remorseful, though not quite repentant. I suspect he needs people to love him again — that’s why he’d messed up his hair. The old dog hung his head but he couldn’t stop smiling every time he thought he’d got away with something.
The barrister Hugo Keith KC was ruthlessly forensic and verbally sparse, grilling him about his “orgy of narcissism”. That seemed tough. In return, Boris splattered around words: zoonotic, agnostic, unpasteurised, fruity; and mixed metaphors about clouds and typhoons, looking out of his depth in a storm of his own making as at one point he asked: “Was it a leap year?”
My mother died in a care home during the pandemic. Did his testimony make the bereaved feel any better? I suspect not. Did he reassure us that Britain had made the right decisions about lockdowns? Definitely not. He appeared to feel most sorry for himself.
That’s the kind of writing that gets hailed as “excoriating” by a certain strain of social media liberal but it’s wet; it’s no more brutal than mild disappointment in a toddler.
Matthew Parris, a man often praised as one of the ‘good Tories’ by people who opt to ignore his writing on immigrants, travellers, and the poor, burnishes his “I told you so” credentials by comparing Johnson to Wind In The Willows’ Mr Toad:
The newfound modesty doesn’t last, of course, and Toad soon reverts. But it serves the moment. It served this morning at the Covid inquiry as, under critical questioning from Badger (well, in this case, Hugo Keith KC), Mr Toad took the witness stand. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had got himself into a mess, lost possession of Downing Street, now occupied by interlopers, and was being asked to account for himself.
Gone was the swagger. Gone was the blustering self-aggrandisement. Gone, indeed, were most of his WhatsApps, mysteriously lost in the wash. Instead, there appeared before us a sober man, a modest man, humbled by fate and a virus — self-abasing, full of gratitude for the efforts of every one of his colleagues.
Blame-shifting and finger-pointing were alien to his nature. Mr de Pfeffel Toad wanted only to praise the scientists, the advisers, the senior civil servants, the cabinet colleagues, all those wonderful folk who had joined him in the noble struggle. The fact that most of these loyal servants had evidently been fighting each other like rats in a sack passed entirely beneath the great amphibian’s notice.
It’s worth noting that while Parris takes aim at ‘Toad’, he joins in the press’ general distaste for the inquiry itself (“the headline-chasing and increasingly irritating Badger KC kept trying to goad him…”). The same tone pervades a long piece from The Times’ Science Editor, Tom Whipple, on this inquiry and public inquiries in general:
This season’s finale of the Covid inquiry has been superb. Season one (preparedness) was, if we were honest, a little underwhelming. Seasons three, four and especially five (healthcare, vaccines and procurement, respectively) will need some clever plotting to maintain the ratings. But season two — government decision-making — has been all we could have wished for.
… What is written, and how, is now Hallett’s choice, and unlike her counsel she has, well, kept her counsel. But, as with all good box sets, the book of the series is coming. As with all good books, it will have more depth, more nuance and a lot more in the way of footnotes. Probably in the spring, the interim report on module 1, Resilience and Preparedness, will be published. You’ll be reading, right?
The New Statesman’s verdict on day one of Johnson’s evidence — written by Rachel Cunliffe — provided an apt demonstration of the clash between the picture painted of him by the press over the years and the drab reality of his performance:
For over a decade, Boris Johnson has loomed larger than life on the stage of British politics. He’s been branded Teflon, a titan, a great survivor. He’s famous for being one of Westminster’s great communicators, Churchillian and Ciceronian in scope and style, quick on his feet with a keen eye for what will resonate with the British public.
None of this was on display today. In the Paddington hearing room which has become drably familiar, Johnson appeared diminished. His trademark scruffiness – ruffled shirt, unruly hair – did not exude the boyish energy it did when he was rocketing up the political ladder. He looked merely disorganised and out of his depth, armed only with weak excuses of “the dog ate my WhatsApp messages” variety.
What’s missing from that first paragraph is who told us that Johnson was “one of Westminster’s great communicators”. It was the media. Time and again, schoolboy Latin and obvious classical allusions welded to a sub-music hall comedy act were sold to us as signs of political greatness. Johnson’s scruffiness and quips looked no weaker in that Paddington hearing room than they ever have, it’s simply that most hacks are no longer engaged in the Emperor’s New Clothes act, pretending that we all couldn’t see it was just balls and a contemptuous man showing his arse.
Cunliffe’s conclusion repeats that common form of media amnesia:
It was sad – tragic almost – to see someone once so powerful perform so poorly. Whatever coaching Johnson’s team offered, none of it seems to have stuck. This was not Cincinnatus waiting to be called back to high office from his plough. There wasn’t even much in the way of bluster and bombast. Johnson came across by turns muddled, aggressive, out of touch and, by the end, crushed. As day one ended, the biggest question wasn’t about R numbers or lockdowns. It was: how on earth was this man prime minister at all?
At the New European, James Ball writes as though he pictures himself as king of the rationalists, leading an independent prosecution of the former Prime Minister but his conclusion actually lets Johnson off:
Boris Johnson doesn’t understand that the atmosphere of his Number 10 was toxic, let alone why it happened. He doesn’t understand why people find the comments he made time and again in WhatsApps and in the margins of government documents are so hurtful. He doesn’t understand why his assurances about the parties in Number 10 fall on deaf ears with the public. He doesn’t understand that his ignorance and dithering killed thousands. Boris Johnson doesn’t understand, and he never will.
Suggesting a man on the cusp of 60 is unable to understand the consequences of his actions is giving him a latitude we should only really extend to small children. Johnson understands, he just doesn’t care about anything other than his own desires.
The reviews — and they are reviews rather than the analysis they purport to be — of Johnson’s performance at the inquiry are so anger-inducing because they continue the pretence that he came out of a clear (Tory) blue sky and that the media merely observed him rather than nurturing his persona and acting as a megaphone for him.
Many people found Johnson’s mendacious music hall act unconvincing when he was still a newspaper columnist. The undercurrent of ‘shock’ that his schtick could not survive beneath the strip lights of the inquiry room is another kind of trick; hacks in the act of claiming they knew it would be like this all along.
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Johnson was always an inverted pile of piffle. The fact he became PM of this country tells you everything about this country. And yes it was a minority of voters but he shouldn’t have even been on a ballot for a local council.
And the blame lies squarely on the press.
Good stuff as ever, Mic. In this through-the-looking-glass world it’s important to be reminded that it was more then a tiny number of us who knew Johnson was a wrong’un all along.