the times | Tuesday May 24 2022 27
Comment
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826PM’s superpower is to trivialise everything
Boris Johnson’s greatest ability is to twist reality so that critics of his dishonesty sound as though they’re unhinged
landscape, like grass or hills, and
even mentioning them makes you
sound like a nag and a bore.
As I write, Downing Street has
just admitted that it asked for the
Gray meeting after all, presumably
having calculated that anybody with
the stamina to keep bickering about
a Google calendar invitation was
going to sound even more petty on
the fourth day than they had for the
past three. This isn’t just his parties
scandal strategy. It’s his everything
strategy. What, you’re still banging
on about whose fault the Northern
Ireland protocol is? Change the
record, mate. Nobody cares who said
what in 2019.
What to do? It’s like we’re married
to him. You, me, the media, Nadhim
Zahawi, everyone. Here he is again,
smirking untruths at the breakfast
table, and what to do? Indulge
him and he wins, but if you screech
at him, he still wins. And worse,
his friends will all go, “Yeah, but
no wonder he behaves like that,
poor guy, because he’s married to
a screecher.”
And so on we go, in vain,
screeching that none of this, actually,
is trivial. It’s about honesty. It’s about
the creeping debasement of the
Conservative Party, of the
government, of the civil service, of
the police, of the country itself.
Screech, screech. Yeah. It’s a
superpower. What a guy.finished, a joke. Yet the actual PM
already has had this actual thing
actually happen, and he made the
laws he broke, and yet somehow it
feels like a detail? Seriously, now?
And, yes, I know I’m sounding shrill.
That’s the thing. That’s what he does.
It’s not just his opponents who end
up looking absurd. It’s his allies, too.
Yesterday’s Daily Mail quoted “Boris
Johnson’s allies” launching a
pre-emptive strike on Gray’s report.
“Sue Gray is supposed to be neutralbut she’s been busy playing politics
and enjoying the limelight a little
too much,” one of them sniped
anonymously. What, has she been on
Britain’s Got Talent? Was she hosting
Have I Got News For You? Have I
perhaps missed a viral Tiktok of her
riverdancing down Whitehall in a
sparkly catsuit? Have some dignity,
for God’s sake. It’s not like he’d so
degrade himself for you.
If you think I sound bitter, you’d
be right. What I hope is also coming
across, though, is awe. The guy has a
superpower. He twists reality. He
slows it down and stretches it out,
until his own terrible mistakes
become mundane, part of theYesterday, there was a new photo.
Perhaps, when Gray’s report comes
there will be more still, including one
of the PM himself with his tie around
his head and wearing no trousers,
and riding a junior colleague around
the Downing Street garden as if that
colleague were a pony. And perhaps
that will be that. Or perhaps her
words will kill him; words like
“leadership” and “lies”. Perhaps, but I
don’t think so. Actually, I think both
of these things could happen, word
for word, and the PM would be fine.
Because, I think, the parties scandal
is over. And he has won.
Everything he has done has
worked. Perfectly. First nobody
could talk about parties because Sue
Gray was about to deliver her
verdict, but then the government
told us to shut up about Sue Gray
because the police were
investigating, too. Then the police
delivered their verdict, complete with
a fine, but if anybody asked about
that then the Johnsonite husks just
said we should wait for Sue Gray,
again. And now that Sue Gray’s
report is about to come, you can just
bet that whatever it says we’ll be told
it doesn’t matter, because he’s
already been fined by the police and
we all ought to move on.
Sorry, wait. Fined by the police?
The actual PM? Fined for partying
while people died? If Keir Starmer
gets fined, he’ll be gone, over,N
adhim Zahawi is the
current Secretary of State
for Going on Telly. This
weekend, on telly, he was
speaking to Sky’s Sophy
Ridge. For background here, she was
asking him who it was who had
arranged a particular, contentious
meeting between Boris Johnson and
the civil servant Sue Gray, who is
about to deliver her report into
whether or not there ain’t no party
like a Downing Street Covid-19 party.
And he was not answering.
It went on for ages. Who arranged
the meeting? No, but who? At one
point, she was effectively asking him
whether he and the PM had had a
meeting about what he was allowed
to say about the meeting, which was
why he wasn’t saying anything. “Yes!”
I found myself thinking. “And if so,
who called that meeting, about the
other meeting?”
The more he didn’t tell us, the
more I began to wonder if there had
been another meeting about that.
Until, eventually, the very phrase
“called the meeting” began to
dissolve in my mind and lose all
meaning, and they could have been
talking about “meeting the calling”
or “calling the meat”. And then, after
about ten minutes of this, they
moved on to stuff like global poverty
and war.
Was this petty? Yes. Was it, indeed,
borderline insane? Again, yes. Yet
was it not also quite important?
Questions like these are the problem
with the parties scandal in a nutshell.
No, more than that. They’re the
problem with Boris Johnson in a
nutshell. All around him, people
sound — and perhaps go — quite,
quite mad. We, in the media, have
been sounding mad for months.
Even Zahawi, one of the
government’s most credibleperformers and a self-made
property beast worth a rumoured
£100 million, is reduced to being a
shifty-eyed handmaiden to gibberish.
How does the PM do this to
people? He’s a vampire. A credibility
vampire. Unable to generate his own,
he sucks it from the veins of others.
And in time, they shrivel to husks —
Matt Hancock-shaped husks — and
he just finds another neck.Having no credibility,
Johnson sucks it from
the veins of others
Indulge him and he
wins. Screech at him
and he still wins
Hugo
Rifkind@hugorifkind