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WWhen someone at the Perugia airport decided to get some publicity about soccer player Luis Suárez’s flight to Italy, they were probably expecting a couple of lines somewhere on the sports pages.
They got much more than that.
Four days later, an innocuous press release about celebrity guests spotted at the airport resulted in a British media frenzy, as well as an irate denial from Downing Street, an intervention by Westminster Cathedral, forensic analysis of the records Zoom from a backbencher and a shy clarification that Boris Johnson was not the same person as Tony Blair.
The chaos began when the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported on claims that Johnson had made a secret trip to Umbria a week earlier. “There is a new mystery surrounding Boris Johnson,” the English version of the story began, before explaining that airport sources had said that he had been in and out of the airport on both sides of a weekend getaway to the region.
There was speculation about a visit to the nearby estate by the owner of the Evening Standard and the imminent Mr. Evgeny Lebedev, possibly to baptize his son.
The story had emerged, reported La Repubblica, from a press release issued by the airport after the visit of the disgruntled Barcelona star, Suárez, to conduct an Italian test and thus secure a passport from the EU that would facilitate any transfer.
“In recent days, many names and personalities from the political, sports and economic world have arrived in Perugia,” the statement said. “From the CEO of Prada, Patrizio Bertelli, to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, preceded by Tony Blair (former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and not least by the champion footballer Luis Suárez … Umbria and our airport are in the center of the world”.
About 1,000 miles north of the center of the world, a Downing Street source was quoted as saying flatly that “this statement is incorrect.” .
But such interventions have little influence among critics of the government who recall, among other indiscretions, the complex relationship of the Downing Street sources to the truth about the Dominic Cummings case. It didn’t help that Johnson had been arrested on an incognito trip to the region earlier, captured in an infamous photograph with cloudy eyes and scruffy after a weekend at Lebedev Castle.
Before long, smelling the old Etonian blood for an indictment that seemed to place the prime minister in the Italian countryside even as talks about Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic were entering their final states of crisis, social media users had assumed enthusiastically the mystery as a national scandal. .
There were Italian eye exam memes, new claims that a “lady at the check-in counter” had confirmed the story, and was scoffing at the idea that anyone would take the prime minister at his word rather than an anonymous airport PR, which is probably not the trusted endorsement Johnson waited as he weighs the wisdom of a second lockdown.
However, by Monday afternoon, the story had been fully revealed.
First Grant Shapps denied it. Then backbencher Andrea Jenkyns it gave the sun a screenshot from Johnson on a Zoom call when he was supposed to be frolicking in a medieval palazzo. While the prime minister certainly looked like he would have preferred to be elsewhere, the picture seemed to place him firmly in Downing Street.
Johnson could not have been in Italy, it was said at the time, because his son’s christening took place in London, a claim later supported by Westminster Cathedral.
Finally, the airport issued a crimson clarification.
Records had been verified, and the only passenger on a private flight from Farnborough was “a private citizen and not Boris Johnson”; Meanwhile, the enthusiastic public relations person had simply confused two British prime ministers, and accidentally made it sound like they had both gone on a trip. And with that, the brief intrusion of the Perugia airport into Britain’s political consciousness ended.
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