Voices: At the end of a disastrous week for Boris Johnson, it’s only fair to ask: how much longer can this go on for?
When you’re the prime minister, and get up before dawn to dress as a police officer in order to launch “crime week” and within hours, what amounts to your entire staff have been accused of committing a crime inside your own house, you might think that is as bad as it gets.
And yet, within a few more hours, you’ll also be facing allegations from a Foreign Office whistleblower that logistical capacity that could have been used to evacuate vulnerable human beings from Afghanistan was instead used, under your instruction, on dogs and cats.
You’ll deny this, but there will also be a letter from your own parliamentary private secretary, Trudy Harrison, sent to the dog and cat people, letting them know they are “authorised to proceed” and have been “cleared for evacuation”. You’ll insist she was acting solely in her capacity as a constituency MP and hope no one wonders too hard about why the MP for Copeland in the Lake District would be authorising people to evacuate from Afghanistan, in the form of a letter which also mentions she works for you.
Not really knowing what else to do, you’ll also tell your communications team to keep up the line that “there was no party”. It’s possible they’ll tell you they don’t think this is wise, because they themselves were at the party, a fact that will almost certainly emerge, but you don’t let this bother you too much. And then, it does emerge.
There’ll also be a video of your advisers, having an actual rehearsal in which they practise how to lie a party out of existence, in which they all collapse in nervous hysterics, because they know you can’t possibly pretend a party that happened didn’t happen. And the video is a year old, which means they worked all this out a year ago, and yet, here you are, a year later, still thinking you can.
The adviser who had the misfortune to be on camera in that video, Allegra Stratton, has now tearfully resigned. And given that she’s seen fit to resign for having a joke, in private, about a party she probably didn’t go to, what are you meant to do about the dozens of people that didn’t just do a joke about it, but actually went to it? That’ll be a problem for another day, too.
And just as well, because another day’s gone by now, and the Electoral Commission has concluded you probably haven’t been completely honest about what and when you knew about who was paying for a two hundred grand refurbishment in your flat (a flat which, by the way, is really not all that large, and now has two tiny children living in it, which is in some ways the most telling revelation of them all. Who, however rich they might be, buys £800-a-roll golden wallpaper for a small flat in which very young children live? To which there is only one answer: someone who doesn’t think they’re paying for the wallpaper themselves, though it later turns out they’ll have to, because they’re not merely corrupt, they’re also not very good at it).
At first glance, it looks like you’ve told one investigation one thing and another investigation another (because, you know, why shouldn’t there have to be two separate public investigations into who’s paid to redecorate your flat). Fortunately, this is all sufficiently opaque and confusing for you to claim nothing untoward has happened, it’s all just quite complex, which is at least better than having to deny the flat even exists.
And you’ve also had to bring in a load of new Covid restrictions because there’s a new variant out there, which ends up with your own MPs shouting, “resign!” at your own health secretary in the middle of the House of Commons, and a general mood of despairing anger all over the country at why exactly anyone should be expected to listen to a single word you have to say, ever again.
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And then, just as it quietens down, and you’ve only got your one-day-old daughter to worry about, it appears that you’ve wrongly executed an alpaca. Geronimo, who was euthanised over the summer for having tuberculosis, well, turns out he didn’t have it after all. Which would be bad enough, but because you purged your party of all its vaguely sane people two and a half years ago, there is no one to disagree with, for example, Marcus Fysh MP, who’s meant to be on your side, but who reckons the wrongful assassination of an alpaca means that no science can be trusted and so vaccine passports are a bad idea.
And amid all this, the airwaves are full of your own MPs pointedly failing to defend you, because they know it’s all entirely indefensible, and your rivals are putting in calls because they know that though the beginning may go on for a long while yet, it’s nevertheless the beginning of the end. If it wasn’t the beginning of the end for you, there’s a fair chance The Daily Telegraph wouldn’t be writing, “Is this the beginning of the end for Boris?” in massive letters across the top of its front page.
And all this before the photos of the party that didn’t happen come out, as they probably will at the weekend. Is it maybe time to start wondering what absolutely everybody else is wondering, which is, what exactly is the point in all this? How much longer can it seriously go on for?
