the times | Wednesday January 19 2022 2GM 7
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Cummings’s skin! A memory to
haunt him for the rest of his days.
Rigby continued that it was “just
ludicrous” for Johnson to say he had
believed the party to be a work do.
“You’re just takin’ the Michael. You
know how silly that sounds, don’t
you? You see that that looks
ridiculous.” The old Johnson always
had a jaunty relationship with Rigby
and would have interrupted and
bubbled back. This Boris was
beaten. Over the rim of that daft
mask — really, why bother with it
after all this? — he gazed at her with
the eyes of a whipped lurcher.
Did he think he could recover
from this? Again, the old Boris
would have chortled and said “of
course”. This one just pleaded for a
chance to be left swaying on the
meat hook until Sue Gray delivered
her investigation into the Downing
Street fiestas.
Theatrically gripping as it was, the
interview was not easy to watch. It
felt more like a political snuff video,
a tape from a police interview room,
a window to a condemned soul’s last
dinner on death row. Johnson held
his hands behind his back almost
throughout. Shades of a prisonerbefore the firing squad. At least he
was not made to kneel before
television’s high executioner.
Today he must face the
Commons. Maybe this interview
will have helped to clear the
polluted air. Not even his most
rabid foes can now claim he is too
cocksure by half. Brought so low
by something so footling! Will this
remarkable piece of television
create a stunned pause in the
frenzy? Maybe.
But the slump of his spirits was
pitiable to behold. How does a
prime minister resurface from
such a fathoms-deep, inky-black
bottom to answer a braying
Commons chamber or to tame
ambitious rivals — let alone see off
Vladimir Putin at the gates to
Ukraine?
Huskiness again entered his
throat as, in response to a question
about some of his aides’ party the
night before Prince Philip’s
funeral, he said: “I bitterly and
deeply regret that that happened.”
He was prostrating himself before
his Monarch and her subjects.
Never glad, boosterist morning
again.site. He had his tie tucked inside his
shirt in the customary health-visit
manner. He made a few half-hearted
attempts to move the conversation
to more positive stuff about how we
were doing better than any country
in the fight against Covid and how
anyone still not vaccinated should
sign up for their jab.
But it was the fight against that
other threat, the Cummings virus,
that was consuming him. He
narrowly survived the first after
intensive care. Maybe this time he’s
a goner.
Johnson would not utter Dominic
Cummings’s name. Rigby repeatedly
mentioned the former No 10
consigliere and invited the PM to
say that Cummings was “lying”
when he claimed to have given his
then boss a warning that the fateful
shindig was a terrible idea. “Nobody
warned me it was against the rules,”
was the closest Johnson would go in
alluding to his old aide.
No, I will NOT speak that damn
man’s name.
Mother Confessor Rigby told her
erring parishioner that this was his
“Barnard Castle moment”. Barnard
Castle! The time he saved
Boris Johnson is facing claims that he
dismissed warnings from staff that he
should go into isolation after contract-
ing coronavirus in March 2020 by tell-
ing them he was as strong as a bull.
The Times has been told that the
prime minister had been showing
symptoms of coronavirus for about a
week before he went into self-isolation
on March 27.
No 10 staff are said to have raised
concerns with him repeatedly after he
developed a bad cough.
Johnson is said to have dismissed
them. One No 10 insider said that de-
spite the warnings he insisted that he
was fine.
“He said he was ‘strong like bull’ and
banged his chest,” the source said. “He
was advised that he might have Covid
but he rejected it. He had a really bad
cough but he was walking round the
office and holding meetings.”
The prime minister announced the
first lockdown on March 23. Johnson
subsequently went into isolation in the
chancellor’s office after Martin Reyn-
olds, the prime minister’s principal pri-
vate secretary, convinced him that he
needed to do so.
However, there are claims that while
he was isolating he failed to observe the
rules and that staff briefed him in the
room.
At one point it is alleged that
members of his private office had to go
into the room to help him with his IT.
Johnson was subsequently admitted to
hospital on April 6 before being moved
to intensive care, where he nearly died.
No 10 said: “Appropriate measures
were taken to ensure the PM was isolat-
ed.”
Dominic Cummings, the prime
minister’s former adviser who has since
become one of his strongest critics, has
repeatedly alleged that Johnson was
determined to see the Queen before he
fell ill with coronavirus. He said that he
stormed out of an interview with his microphone still attached; Layla Somani’s views on the PM have been a hit online wanted to visit her on March 18.
German pundits and politicians have
always regarded Boris Johnson as, by
our standards, too flamboyant to be
taken seriously. Someone better suited
to the comedian’s stage.
We were also slightly envious. Ger-
many likes its politicians to be dull. Lis-
tening to our chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is
about as inspiring as having someone
read out the user manual of a Míele
appliance. This was the very reason he
was elected. We wanted someone with
a steady hand, not an entertainer.
Yet when Johnson came to Berlin to
break the impasse in those dreadful
Brexit negotiations, he surprised the
assembled press by quoting — in Ger-
man — Angela Merkel’s famous “Wir
schaffen das”, which can be translated
as “We will get this done”. We admired
him for his charm and audacity.
Now, most observers agree his down-
fall was predictable. We were aston-
ished by how blatantly he circumvent-
ed constitutional convention when heWe Germans knew he’d
blow it, but over a party?
prorogued parliament to stifle resist-
ance to his Brexit manoeuvres. We
were shocked when he threatened to
override the exit deal he had signed
with the EU because details concerning
the sea border with Northern Ireland
were no longer to his liking.
So that his downfall could come from
attending a drinks party seems a little
out of proportion. Jochen Buchsteiner,
who observes Britain’s politics for
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, puts it
down to Britain’s love of drama. He ar-
gues that the more time passes, the
more likely Boris is to survive this
witch-hunt (my words). An inter-
national crisis, like the one at Russia’s
border with Ukraine, just might save
him, Buchsteiner muses.
If he does survive, I will applaud it.
The British voted him into office
because of his eccentricity and cavalier
attitude to how politics is done. What
you see is what you get — and you got
what you saw.
Alexander von Schoenburg is a columnist
for Bild, Germany’s best-read newspaperAlexander von Schoenburg BerlinNews
‘Coughing PM
told staff he was
strong as a bull’
Cummings told the BBC last year: “I
said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said,
‘I’m going to see the Queen,’ and I said,
‘What on earth are you talking about,
of course you can’t go and see the
Queen.’
“He said, ‘Ah, that’s what I do every
Wednesday, sod this, I’m gonna go and
see her.’ I said to him, ‘There’s people in
this office who are isolating, you might
have coronavirus, I might have corona-
virus, you can’t go and see the Queen.
“What if you go and see her and give
the Queen coronavirus? You obviously
can’t go.’
“I just said if you, if you give her coro-
navirus and she dies what, what are you
gonna, you can’t do that, you can’t risk
that, that’s completely insane.
“And he said, he basically just hadn’t
thought it through. He said, ‘Yeah, holy
shit, I can’t go.”
Johnson subsequently had a phone
call with the Queen instead of meeting
her in person. No 10 has categorically
denied the claim.
Cummings has also alleged that
Johnson told him that he should never
have agreed to implement the first
lockdown. He said: “He [Johnson] then
basically reverted and said, ‘Actually
the whole thing was a disaster, we
should never have done it, I was right in
February, we should basically just
ignore it and just let the thing wash
through the country and not destroy
the economy and move on’,” Cum-
mings said.
Cummings said that Johnson had
repeatedly ignored the advice of his
chief scientific and medical advisers to
implement a second lockdown.
He said: “When you get to the week
of around about 15 to 19 September, by
that point the data was clear about
what was happening and Patrick
Vallance and Chris Whitty came to
Downing Street and said, ‘Erm, it’s
clear where this is going, we think that
you should consider hitting it hard and
early.. .’ The prime minister said, ‘No,
no, no, no, no, I’m not doing it’.”Steven Swinford Political EditorIAN VOGLER/GETTY IMAGES; KENNEDY MEDIA