Monday 26 April 2021

Johnson can't stop digging

The newspapers are having a field day with Johnson. He and his antics are on the front page of all of them or so it seems.  Once this sort of hue and cry starts rolling it is very hard to stop until the person at the centre is destroyed. Johnson is known to want to be liked and admired so the present furore over any number of things is bound to be having an impact. He will be braced for more revelations coming later today from cabinet secretary Simon Case, a civil servant, who one assumes is more likely to tell the truth when he appears before a select committee of MPs.

The problem for the PM and the Tory party, despite their rather surprising position in the polls right now, is that he has a lot of history going back years and journalists know what stories are popular. They, and some legal teams, are picking away at so many things its hard to keep track. Every time something appears in print there are more intriguing references to other things and more stories then emerge like a chain reaction.

For example, in The Sunday Times story, Cummings is apparently worried about going to jail as Carole Cadwalladr from The Guardian mentions in this tweet.

This is about files that were deleted from a shared hard drive in the Vote Leave/Be Leave campaigns. On March 17 2017, somebody at Vote Leave deleted 140 files which showed evidence of an electoral offence being committed. This was sixteen days after the Electoral Commission announced it was carrying out an investigation into the campaigns.

At the time some lawyers thought this could amount to a perversion of justice. But it was never fully investigated. But we don't know if this is what Cummings is concerned about or if it's something else even worse.

Next, we learn that Johnson did not, at the outset at least, pay for the refurbishing of the flat above No 10 and there is speculation he was 'loaned' the money. But he earns £160,000 a year and in 2019 sold the London house he and his then estranged wife Marina Wheeler had lived in, for £3.35 million, buying another property with his girlfriend Carrie Symonds for £1.3 million.  He used to earn £275,000 a year from The Telegraph, yet we are somehow expected to believe he was so strapped for cash he needed to borrow to top up the £30,000 he was allowed to spend in Downing Street out of public funds.

I am stunned that he has no savings and needed to borrow money from a donor. It is far more likely that the famously tight-fisted Johnson just wanted someone else to cough up the money.

The Daily Mail are reporting that during the pandemic last year, before he was forced to announce another lockdown, he is alleged to have said he would rather see ‘bodies pile high in their thousands’ than order more restrictions.  He was forced to act after Michael Gove warned him that soldiers would be needed to guard hospitals overrun with Covid victims.

I imagine there is a lot more where that came from. He is a man remarkably free with his opinions and jokes about serious things (remember Operation 'last gasp' about the ventilators?) and Cummings is said to have a lot of written and audio stuff from his time in Downing Street.  He may have thought last year was bad but it looks as if 2021 is turning out to be Johnson's own Annus Horribilis.

The advice about stopping digging when you are in a hole seems not to apply to Johnson, sinkholes simply appear beneath him constantly and usually from something he did a long time ago when he thought he was invincible. He doesn't even need to do his own digging.

Alastair Campbell used to have a rule that if you are the story for a few days then you need to go.  But Johnson has been the story for weeks and it has barely got started. We are just scratching the surface.

I think when he is finished, which might be a lot closer than we think, everybody who ever knew him or worked with him will be making money out of a tell-all story. I am sure that many, like Cummings, have been keeping a diary. I do hope so.

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