A promiscuous attitude to the truth: Lord Turnbull on Boris Johnson

It’s rare for a former Cabinet Secretary to comment critically on a serving Prime Minister, but Lord Turnbull — Cabinet Secretary to Tony Blair, and Principal Private Secretary to both Margaret Thatcher and John Major — doesn’t mince his words about Boris Johnson.

“He’s very unusual,” he told me. “The work ethic of Mrs Thatcher and to some extent John Major has not been followed at all. They were absolutely scrupulous in preparing themselves for a meeting, reading the brief the night before, conducting a meeting and trying to get a decision. Blair, less so, but he still, he wasn’t a sort of, er, an inherent sort of cheat.”

JW: Cheat?

LT: Cheat. He [Blair] didn’t want to cheat the rules.

JW: You think the Prime Minister is a cheat?

LT: Well, you need to draw your own conclusions. I mean, let’s put it this way: do the British people think he’s a cheat? Just listen to the radio, you don’t have to take my opinion for it, just listen to what out there, people are saying.”

JW: What do you think his relationship to the truth is?

LT: Promiscuous. I don’t know, the answer is: I don’t think he is regarded as someone who — getting things right is an absolute priority.

JW: What do you think he’s done to the office of Prime Minister?

LT: Well, I think he’s demeaning it, there’s no other way of putting it.”

As the most senior civil service adviser to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Cabinet Secretary acts as guardian of propriety and ethics – an issue now at the heart of the Prime Minister’s predicament over Partygate.

Commenting on Mr Johnson’s insistence that he didn’t realise the 20 May 2020 “bring your own booze” gathering in the garden of Number 10 was a party, Lord Turnbull quips: “He should have gone to Specsavers. It’s pretty obvious it was a party. When someone says ‘we want to gather together in the sunshine’, you can see that it’s a party.”

The Prime Minister’s response was like “the schoolboy’s dog ate my homework — a series of excuses and it’s clear that the truth is not being told. Increasingly implausible excuses.”

But were there not parties in Mrs Thatcher’s Number 10?

“There were clearly parties — promotions, resignations,” he explains. “What there wasn’t were discos with music going on past midnight. Now just imagine it, you are in Number 10 and you set a disco going and up there is Mrs Thatcher, probably still awake and reading her papers. Are you going to take a chance? She’d have come down in her dressing gown and told everyone to go home.”

I put Lord Turnbull’s view of the Prime Minister to Conor Burns, the minister often put up by Number 10 to defend Mr Johnson on Partygate. He’s a man “of his word” said Mr Burns, “a man who has got a vision for this country…

JW: An honest man?

CB: My experience of the Prime Minister, I’ve known him a long time, he’s always been straightforward and faithful to me in our dealings.

JW: A man of integrity?

CB: A man who is getting on with the job, a man of integrity, a man of decency…”

However, Lord Turnbull considers that Partygate is just “the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger picture” of Mr Johnson’s Downing Street having played “fast and loose” with rules governing ethical standards in public office.

Under the Johnson government, he says, “where there are institutions who can constrain or criticise the actions of government, the Government’s instinct is to try and cut them down to size: abolish them, water down their powers, reduce their scope…The wider pattern in some ways is actually a lot more damaging than Partygate itself.”

One example, he says, of “winding the clock back” on standards regulation, was Mr Johnson’s attempt to establish a new parliamentary committee, controlled by Conservatives, to review the work of the existing standards committee and to block its 30-day suspension of his friend Owen Paterson MP for multiple breaches of the rules governing paid advocacy by MPs.

The attempt backfired and ended in humiliation for the Prime Minister.

Over 100 Conservative MPs rebelled or abstained, while other parties refused to participate in the review committee. Mr Paterson resigned, triggering a by-election for a seat, North Shropshire, that the Tories had held for almost 200 years. This time, they lost it.

Asked what qualities a Prime Minister needed, Lord Turnbull said: “Integrity.” Also: “You’ve got to know which battle you want to fight.”

Another example of the Prime Minister rolling back the standards regime is what Lord Turnbull calls his “hypocrisy” over the ministerial code, which each Prime Minister has to personally review and sign on taking office. In the foreword to his code, Boris Johnson wrote: “The precious principles of public life enshrined in this document, integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership in the public interest must be honoured at all times.”

Breaches of the ministerial code are investigated by an adviser, appointed by the Prime Minister. Mr Johnson is now on his second ministerial code adviser. The first – Sir Alex Allan — resigned in November 2020, after the Prime Minister didn’t accept his finding that the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had breached the code by bullying staff.

Yet in his ministerial code Mr Johnson had spelled out: “There must be no bullying and no harassment.”

His decision to brush aside Sir Alex Allan’s finding had been “pretty damaging” to civil service morale, says Lord Turnbull. The civil servants who came forward to testify to the Home Secretary swearing and shouting at them “will be feeling that although the advisor thought their stories were plausible, nothing happened.”

Lord Turnbull also questioned Mr Johnson‘s commitment to what he emphasised in his ministerial code are the “precious principles of integrity and transparency” when it came to another investigation, this time into the prime minister himself.

That investigation was into what’s become known as “Wallpapergate” — how the £112,000 cost of refurbishing his Downing Street flat was paid for and whether Mr Johnson declared what he knew about the funding arrangements — and when he knew it — in his lists of interests which might pose a conflict of interest.

The investigation was conducted by Lord Geidt, the ministerial adviser Mr Johnson appointed to replace Sir Alex Allan.

In clearing the Prime Minister initially of any wrongdoing, Lord Geidt found that “at no point” prior to February 2021 had Mr Johnson been aware of “either the fact or the method of the costs of refurbishing the apartment having been paid” and that when he did he “took steps to make the relevant declaration.”

However, eight months later Lord Geidt discovered that Mr Johnson had failed to disclose a WhatsApp exchange with the former Conservative vice chairman and multi-millionaire Lord Brownlow, which suggested he’d known about the funding arrangements all along.

On 29 November 2020, Mr Johnson had messaged Lord Brownlow to ask if Lulu Lytle (the interior designer his then fiancée, later wife, Carrie Symonds had chosen to refurbish their Downing St flat) could “get in touch for approvals” of money owed to Ms Lytle. To this Lord Brownlow responded: “approval is a doddle as it’s only me and I know where the £ will come from, so as soon as Lulu calls we can crack on.”

Lord Geidt only became aware of what he calls this “missing exchange” when a separate investigation by the Electoral Commission was published in December 2021. Had Lord Geidt known this when investigating Wallpapergate, he said he doubted he’d have concluded “without qualification” that the Prime Minister had declared Lord Brownlow’s donation as soon as he knew about it.

Lord Geidt told Mr Johnson that it was “of grave concern to me” that no attempt was made “to check for information relevant to my enquiries, such as the Missing Exchange. I consider that the greatest possible care should have been taken to assemble all relevant material and this standard has not been met.”

The Prime Minister apologised to Lord Geidt, but said that due to security issues, he hadn’t had access to the phone on which the “missing exchange” was stored. However, when the phone was later “activated again”, the WhatsApp exchange was still not disclosed to Geidt.

What did Lord Turnbull consider might explain Mr Johnson’s failure to disclose the “missing exchange”? He replied: “I think the Prime Minister is congenitally incurious. You don’t ask questions that could cause you problems. He doesn’t go looking for the rules and saying: ‘Am I within them?’”

And while Mr Johnson may have committed himself to what he calls the “precious principles” of the ministerial code, “by his actions, he clearly doesn’t believe it. He may say he does, but you know, this is just hypocrisy, isn’t it?”

Finally, how did he think Mr Johnson had treated the two advisers he’d appointed to investigate breaches of his ministerial code, one of whom had resigned, the other who was clearly exasperated. “Shabbily,” replied Lord Turnbull.

John Ware conducted this interview while reporting for BBC Panorama’s “Boris Johnson on the brink”, broadcast on Monday 31 January. Some lines included here have already appeared on BBC Online.

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