Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday. Credit … Jessica Taylor v Parliament of the United Kingdom, via Agence France-Presse – Getty Images
This latest scandal, about a Member of Parliament accused of sexual misconduct, is just one of a long and similarly tiring series of self-inflicted problems that have affected Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.
And his answer to that — his original statement that he had been unaware of any formal complaint against the officer, Chris Pincher, followed by a series of painful revelations and, finally, the admission that he had, in fact, known since time immemorial- was the Johnson textbook. .
Deceive, omit, overshadow, brag, deny, deflect, attack: the prime minister’s plan to deal with a crisis, his critics say, almost never begins, and rarely ends, simply by telling the truth. Instead, it usually begins with a denial, going through several provisional admissions in which its previous falsehoods are recast as honorable efforts of transparency, and then ending with a great show of remorse in which it seems to take responsibility for what happened while suggests it was not his fault.
Think about how Mr. Johnson resisted the scandal before it, for alcohol parties at 10 Downing Street and other government offices in violation of the strict Covid blockade rules his government had imposed on the rest of the country. As a defense attorney who keeps all his options open in court, Mr. Johnson unfolded a series of often contradictory statements to explain the “Partygate,” as it was called.
“They were gatherings of people at work,” he said initially, when photos of the first party surfaced. “This is where I live, and this is where I work. They were meetings of people at work, talking about work ”.
When it became clear that there had been a second party, in the garden, and that he had in fact attended, Mr.’s spokesman. Johnson first said the prime minister had not been notified in advance that there would be a meeting.
The same Mr. Johnson stated he knew about the party, but had mistakenly thought it was a “work event.” Then, echoing Bill Clinton’s famous explanation “I didn’t inhale” when he was accused of smoking marijuana in Oxford, the prime minister declared that in any case, he had only stayed 25 minutes.
“No one told me what we were doing was going against the rules,” he said. “When I went out in that garden I thought I was attending a work event.”
After that, the evidence of a myriad of other parties began to pour into the newspapers so thick and fast that it began to seem as if no day had passed when the staff of No. 10 was not partying. until nightfall. There was one in which Mr. Johnson was photographed with staff members, surrounded by tinsel and wearing a Santa hat, and another that turned out to be a birthday party held for him, with a cake.
Mr. Johnson kept repeating, in various ways, that he knew nothing of anything, that if he had known he would not have gone there, that people had to work and sometimes did so when there was wine present, and that, so knew. , no rule was broken.
He ended up paying a fine for non-compliance with Covid regulations, along with his wife and 81 other people, after police opened an investigation into 12 of the parties.
Then Mr. Johnson went into total contrition mode and seemed to believe (correctly, as it turned out) that his apology would be enough to overcome the last difficult patch.
New details emerged from a seven-hour party on Downing Street the night before the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh – a funeral in which his widow, the Queen, sat alone due to Covid’s restrictions. , Mr. Johnson said he was very sorry.
“I deeply and bitterly regret that this has happened,” Mr. Johnson in the House of Commons. He added: “I can only renew my apologies to both His Majesty and the country for the errors of judgment that have been made, and for which I take full responsibility.”