Jacob Rees-Mogg has an article in The Sunday Express this morning. You know when things are going badly when his likes start writing puff pieces in the low grade Sunday papers. He says there are many “big wins” in the pipeline and the aim is to see “significantly higher” GDP and improved standards of living. If Brexit succeeds he thinks the political question over EU membership will be finished "once and for all." I think therefore we can take it as read that we will one day return to the EU.
He said: “There is a lot in the legislative pipeline that will deliver a Brexit dividend whether this is the Procurement Bill, services reform, gene editing. The Bill for freeports has almost completed its passage. Much was being done and perhaps people didn’t know how much was being done and part of my role is to be a loud hailer for it.”
If Freeports and gene editing are the best he can manage after six years, we can already see Brexit will be a failure.
Elsewhere, in The Guardian, Nick Cohen, a great writer of political pieces and someone I always read wherever his articles appear, writes perhaps the most blistering piece ever written about a government, any government, anywhere: Lies come in all shapes and sizes. This government is familiar with them all. I’m sorry to say it’s the British government he’s writing about and the daily outpouring of lies that we’ve come to expect.
Each paragraph starts: "This is a government that lies. It lies because...."
I think you need to be stone deaf and absolutely tribal to defend what’s happening but I am amazed how many Tory MPs and commentators are prepared to abase themselves in print or on TV and claim that obvious, provable lies are true.
It was Joseph Goebels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” With Johnson he only needs to tell a lie once for his acolytes and apologists in the press to claim it’s either true, a mistake or he didn’t mean what everybody took it to mean.
He himself once said he has never told a lie in spite of being sacked twice for telling them. He even lies about lying.
Rory Stewart once said,
“Johnson is … the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true.”
Cohen’s article is along the same lines but his piece doesn’t actually refer to Johnson at all. It’s tagged under Johnson but his name doesn’t appear. Yet it’s quite obvious the rot really set in as soon as he became prime minister.
This isn’t to excuse Theresa May who had to carry on her short premiership dragging behind her the lie that Brexit would be good for Britain, even though she had explicitly campaigned against it. Johnson, in other words had started to infect government even before he became foreign secretary, by convincing a narrow majority that quitting the single market would benefit us, forcing ministers to parrot the same nonsense.
I can’t remember a British prime minister ever whose reputation sunk so low. Even Lloyd-George only sold peerages, something which has become so commonplace it barely gets a mention. Fifteen of the last sixteen Tory party treasurers, millionaires all, have ended up with peerages after ‘giving’ £3 million to the party.
I don’t believe any previous PM lied so often about so many things as Johnson does. As Cohen says, the government lies even when he doesn’t need to. This is Johnson's doing. It’s like a tic with him, an instinctive reaction to a question.
Politicians, senior ones at least, are not entirely stupid. They have an animal cunning and learn quickly. How many future leaders will have seen what Johnson does and what he gets away with. Do they conclude he’s a charlatan? No, they conclude the voters are stupid and capable of believing anything, even flat out lies.
On the party gate affair, you can see how deluded Johnson has become in a Times article yesterday by Steve Swinford and Oliver Wright. They say he will not resign whatever happens.
“In all scenarios, including if the police fine him for breaking the law, Johnson is determined to fight on. He considers himself a democratically elected prime minister with a huge mandate,” one ally said.
“He is not going to walk off stage. The party stuff is yet to be put to any sort of accurate electorate test. He is an enormous democrat. He has been elected, he serves at the will of the people. It’s a fact for him.”
It’s hard to know what would cause him to resign, theft, criminal damage, GBH, murder? Who knows?
In Johnson world if you’re democratically elected, even by the use of lies (remember the oven ready deal?) you are allowed to ignore the law of the land. It’s like Soviet Russia or Vladimir Putin.
Allies say that he will not “do a David Cameron” and resign. He is said to be “absolutely determined” to stay and believes he has done nothing wrong. One minister compared the fixed penalty notice to a speeding ticket or a parking fine.
“He genuinely thinks he’s innocent and in many ways he is,” an ally who has spoken to him recently said. “Everybody says he’s in charge of No 10 so he is totally responsible. He would have no clue of what was going on in the outer reaches of No 10.”
The Times piece says his fate probably won't not be in his own hands. If he gets a fixed penalty notice, apparently the whips charged with saving his premiership believe it is "almost inevitable that rebel Tory MPs will hit the 54 letters of no confidence they need to trigger a confidence vote."
Johnson is clearly and shamelessly intending to stand again and may even do it!
This is what the Conservative party has brought us to. Never forget it.
Finally, Stephen Barclay - the dogsbody of this administration - has told The Sunday Telegraph that the government will take a "step back" from people's lives and pursue "a smaller state." This comes as public spending and taxation rise to a 70 year high.
This would sound more believable coming from Jeremy Corbyn.
