As part of the Spectator’s live coverage of the Boris Johnson trial, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson has written a comment that is worth reproducing in full as it highlights the absurdity of the spectacle but also the important lesson political leaders may hopefully take from it.
So the trial of Boris Johnson has finished its first act, and it comes across as theatrical nonsense. Boris Johnson has already admitted that he misled the Commons by falsely denying that parties took place in No. 10: his defence is that he thought he was telling the truth at the time. As he said, in 10 months the parliamentary investigation has seen or heard no evidence to the contrary. The seven-member committee, four of them Tories, need to work out not what he did but what was in his mind. A hard task, especially without any evidence. And four hours of Johnson commentary is unlikely to change that.
I find this irritating because lying to parliament – which he did – would not even make the top 50 of his lockdown mistakes. We learn today that 140,000 kids never properly came back to school: how many minutes will that get on the BBC Six O’Clock News? This is the Boris effect: he holds more interest than the fate of tens of thousands of children who ended up casualty to his policies. But parliament is not dictated by ratings. So what’s to stop the MPs actually uncovering something new and important, rather than play lockdown Cluedo? Where’s the parliamentary inquiry into why the police were ever used in lockdown when voluntary guidance would suffice? What about the way he collapsed our democratic architecture during lockdown? What about the rule by WhatsApp that he allowed, as disclosed in such devastating detail by the Daily Telegraph’s investigation? But these are hard questions: far easier to poke Boris’s political corpse – laying on a circus for the cameras.
But then again, there is one way the public is certainly served by this spectacle. He did draw up these laws; he did needlessly send the police after tens of thousands of people. So it’s not just right but important that politicians end up ensnared in the traps they set for others. So next time a Prime Minister intends to abridge the liberty of millions, they may remember the scenes of the Boris trial and pause.
Fraser later adds:
Listening to the ridiculous wrangling over the minutiae of the rules almost provokes sympathy for Boris Johnson – until you remember those caught up in just-as-ridiculous laws which he imposed and decided to criminalise.
- The woman handcuffed for queuing for a coffee shop.
- The young woman from Pontypool fined £2,000 after visiting a home to support a friend who had fled an abusive relationship.
- The man fined for having driven too far to go fishing.
- Parents in Broxborne fined for letting their child have a sleepover with a friend.
- The Horncastle pensioners fined for eating a bag of chips in a laundrette.
The Spectator was arguing for some time that the Covid rules should be decriminalised and reduced to guidance. No. 10 had very little to lose by calling off the cops. I wonder if, by now, Johnson is starting to wish that he had done so.
Follow the Spectator’s live coverage here.
Stop Press: Watch Toby join Dan Wootton on GB News to react to the grilling: “Boris wouldn’t be in this pickle if he hadn’t imposed these absolutely absurd rules in the first place.”
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