If you’re defending a PM who makes draconian new laws then breaks them, I’m afraid your public service mechanism is shot
Defending the indefensible prime minister over pandemic lawbreaking, one Conservative MP sniffed to the Financial Times: “It’s not as if he walked into a rave in Ibiza.” I mean … all the clubs in Ibiza were dutifully shut, what with it being a pandemic? But yes, how encouraging that Amnesia holds itself to a higher standard than No 10.
Today marks 1,000 days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and you have to agree he has truly delivered on his flagship levelling down agenda. Johnson drags everyone to the bottom. In the afternoon of this totemic day, the prime minister was forced to stand up in the House of Commons – or the Bollocksseum, as his behaviour repeatedly casts it. Here, in the course of spouting some more utter cobblers, he acknowledged that he had been fined by the police for breaking a law. This was not only a law he had made himself, but one that he had stressed the absolutely vital importance of sticking to, every night on TV. Meanwhile, a load of Tory MPs will gibber their way across the airwaves to explain that this is no biggie. With the exception of those few backbenchers to have called for the prime minister’s resignation, the hardest line you’ll hear from any other Conservative member of parliament is that they are “waiting to see the local election results”.
