The prime minister’s strategy of apology and denial has failed. His authority is shot
In the days when he combined the job of Tory MP with editing the Spectator magazine, Boris Johnson was forced to go to Liverpool to apologise following the publication of a gratuitously offensive editorial about the city. Later, revealing his true feelings, he derided the episode as “Operation Scouse-grovel”. But the faux-contrition did the trick. In his biography of Mr Johnson, the journalist Andrew Gimson writes: “The Liverpool debacle did no lasting damage. It amused a great number of people and made him even more famous.”
Faced with a nation’s outrage during a public health crisis, Mr Johnson appears to have believed he could get away with a similarly disingenuous approach. Unable to deny that he attended a lockdown-breaking drinks party in the garden of Downing Street, the prime minister has issued grovelling apologies while deploying sophistry to evade the consequences of his actions. His latest self-exculpatory move – made during an abject interview with Sky television – was to suggest that no one in No 10 warned him that the May 2020 party broke Covid rules. The language chosen was deliberately specific, failing to rule out warnings of a more general kind; but in essence Mr Johnson asked the country to swallow the idea that he was the only person in Downing Street who did not understand what was taking place on 20 May. It is a proposition so shamelessly implausible that one senses that even Mr Johnson does not expect it to be believed.
