Wednesday 13 April 2022

Lawbreaking at the top of government

So now we know. Boris Johnson broke his own law when he partied in Downing Street on 19 June 2020. The Metropolitan Police announced 30 more Fixed Penalty Notices yesterday and Downing Street then confirmed both the PM and Chancellor Rishi Sunak had each received one along with Johnson’s wife Carrie, for attending the PMs birthday party. Despite that they have both confirmed they intend to carry on.

We have truly touched rock bottom. As Max Hastings once said in 2019, if we elect Boris Johnson Britain will have given up on any pretence to be a serious country. I am afraid that has become horribly true.

After the revelation, he came out to make a statement and had to READ it (HERE) as if someone else had written it for him and he didn't believe a word of it anyway. He actually said, “people had a right to expect better.” Yes we do, but he won’t resign.  I am ashamed of my own country.

Johnson has debased every tenet of democracy, every shred of decency, every scrap of integrity that this once great nation stood for. Morally bankrupt, self obsessed, weak, a liar, untrustworthy, unfaithful, dishonest to the core, dishevelled, a cheat, corrupt and now a criminal. Unless he’s found to have taken money from a church poor box, it’s hard to see how much lower he can sink. 

To add to the litany of his failings, the man who was telling us almost nightly what the rules were, apparently was too dim to understand them himself! He said yesterday:

“And I have to say in all frankness, at the time, it did not occur to me that this might have been a breach of the rules.”

This is the best that Britain can offer, a sorry excuse for a human being devoid of honour and ignorant of any ethical concepts whatsoever and too stupid to understand his own rules or to think for one second they might apply to him. He behaves like a medieval monarch. 

Other parties could also result in more fines so this may become a regular performance. Someone close to the investigations said the 19 June event was the least likely to end in a fine. That such a man rose to the top is an indictment of Eton, the public school system and British education in general. How have we managed to produce an electorate that thought it was OK to vote him in?

Nothing will shift Johnson. Corruption and scandal have become the ordinary coinage of government under him and now, despite real criminality and the first time in history that a serving prime minister (or not serving for that matter) has been found guilty of breaking the law, let alone one he himself passed, he stubbornly refuses to step down.

It will take heavy howitzers to remove him.

Not only has he broke the law but he has also automatically broken the ministerial code which requires him to comply with the law. And he has lied, repeatedly to the House of Commons when he denied there were ANY parties and all rules were followed.

Yet Conservative ministers are coming out to support him! There is not a ha’porth of integrity among the lot. 

And it seems his MPs will also stand by him.  The line is we're in the middle of a war and he's leading the free world. This, apart from being utterly ludicrous and simply not true, is in my opinion why he MUST go. Anyone unable to understand his or her own rules shouldn't be allowed out unsupervised never mind 'lead the free world.'

Sooner or later, there will be a vote of confidence and Tory MPs will need to make a choice. If they support him and the police give him another FPN it will all blow up in their faces.

 James O’Brien tweeted:

How anyone with a record like Johnson can be called Right Honourable is beyond me.  He has shattered every illusion we might have had that those we elect into Downing Street have the slightest empathy for ordinary men and women.

Robert Peston tweeted that, "This is not just a slippery slope. It is the bottom of the slope."

I wonder how many people would have visited a sick or dying relative and simply accepted a £50 FPN like Johnson after saying they didn't think it breached any rules?  But they didn't because they thought it was important to stick to the law. Many would have been ashamed to get a fine. Johnson doesn't do shame as Blair didn't do God.

And the idea that he’s done well on Covid or Ukraine so it’s ok to break the law is risible. Every PM in our history would have done better. And the law isn't like a bank account with debits and credits. You can't get away with armed robbery if you've been a lay preacher, or avoid a speeding fine if you're a member of the Salvation Army.  Think about it for heaven's sake!

Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative Attorney General says Johnson has corrupted the entire party and now you can see what that means. They actually think a bit of law breaking is OK.  

Politicians talk of 'values' as if they're imposed by law. Some might be but most enduring British values are set by example. History is full of them. King Alfred, Florence Nightingale, Titus Oates, Ernest Shackleton, Lord Carrington and plenty of others, set benchmarks for us all. With Johnson you have to ask which standard or value he hasn't lowered, trashed or made a mockery of at one time or another.

I note another reason given by Tory MPs to support him is that they haven't got another decent candidate to take over. Now think about that for an admission.

The Times claims Sunak prepared a resignation letter yesterday but friends persuaded him not to use it because it might be seen as an act of ‘regicide’ on Johnson which would damage his own chances of succeeding him as PM. This supposes he had a chance after he and his wife’s tax dodging affairs came out and it was revealed Sunak held a US green, permanent resident card for years and filled in American tax returns!

So, whatever tiny scintilla of integrity might have existed in No 11 was ditched on the altar of personal ambition.  He’s not even doing a good job. Inflation is running at 7% it was announced this morning.

This is today's headline in The Daily Mirror:

 What have we come to?

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