No job for a liar

The decision by MPs to hold a formal investigation into whether Boris Johnson lied to Parliament is a reminder of the great weakness at the centre of our political system. That weakness comes from the assumption that the people who run our country act in good faith. That they are decent. That they tell the truth. It’s often referred to — in somewhat arcane language — as the “good chap” theory. In the Commons yesterday, several of Johnson’s own MPs made it clear that they did not regard the PM as a good chap. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Having a liar in No10 undermines the entire political system. If politicians lie, how do you know who to vote for at a General Election? They say they will do certain things in office, but how can you trust a liar’s manifesto? How can you ever tell which politician truly represents your interests? What’s more, government has huge powers of oversight — how can you be certain that what they say about the state of the economy or society or the army or the health service has any basis in fact?

Johnson will go — all political careers end in some sort of disaster. But really, he should have gone long ago. The arguments in favour of him staying are weak to the point of non-existence.

The first and most popular argument against Johnson’s resignation is that the Prime Minister is “getting on with the job”. But the problem for the liar is that no one knows what “the job” consists of. Is “the job” to run the country? Or is it self-preservation? And if we were to ask the Prime Minister “what is the job along with which you want to get?” would his answer have any meaning?

As MPs debated whether Johnson should be investigated for lying, the miscreant himself was several thousand miles away, in India, making a show of “getting on with the job”. But what, really, was he doing out there? At one point he was pictured sitting in the driver’s seat of a JCB (the company is owned by a Conservative donor). He was also photographed wearing traditional Indian clothing.

But what was the point of it all? Was he developing commercial links with Indian business? Or was he attempting to distract from scandal at home? The trouble with the liar is not that it’s hard to discern the truth, it’s that it is impossible. You don’t know what he’s doing in part because he doesn’t know himself. And that is the ultimate tragedy of the liar — they begin to believe their own deceptions. Getting on with the job? It’s not even clear he knows what the job is.

The second argument against the PM’s resignation holds that leaders should not resign during wartime. A brief glimpse at Britain’s political history from 1939-45 shows that this is clearly nonsense. The other part of this argument is that Britain has been so effective at supplying weapons to Ukraine that Johnson should remain in place to continue this policy. This invites us to accept the idea that Boris Johnson created Britain’s policy towards Ukraine and that the idea to supply weapons was his alone. Given his record of failure and ineptitude in almost every other policy area, it is hard to swallow this suggestion.

But if we do accept it, and credit Johnson with the plan to arm the Ukraine military, the question then is whether the outcome of the Ukraine War depends on Boris Johnson continuing in office. The answer to that is self-evidently “no”.

The third argument against Johnson’s ejection from No10 is that there is no one to replace him. Sunak was until recently the heir apparent, but he is now discredited. Good company man that he is, Sunak followed all of the rules, safe in the knowledge that they would protect him and his family from accusations of wrongdoing. Tax laws may differentiate between what is and is not legal — but they do not differentiate between what is and is not hypocritical. Sunak did not appreciate this and his shot at getting into No10 is now surely over.

As a result, the PM’s supporters argue, there is no one who can take over from Johnson and therefore he must stay. It’s hard to imagine a more damning argument, one that not only admits that the PM should go, but contains the assumption that the entire Conservative party is so under-powered that it is incapable of producing an individual capable of running the country.

Johnson was always a historical aberration, a sort of Brexit Booby-Prize. If it hadn’t been for the 2016 vote and the extraordinary turmoil that followed, he never would have had a chance at becoming Prime Minister. But Britain’s populist moment is now over. Now we confront war, economic dislocation and declining standards of living. We need a political leader who can talk clearly and openly about those things, and articulate clearly what is to be done. That’s no job for a liar.

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