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meIt would not be the prime minister’s questions without Boris Johnson being accused of telling at least one lie. In fact, in recent months it has often felt as if Boris had made a bet with Dominic Cummings to see if he could outdo himself in the lies of the week before. But usually Boris saves his biggest lies for his exchanges with Keir Starmer. This time he reserved his best triumphs for London MPs concerned about the planned changes to London Transport and city taxes.
Not that Starmer didn’t comfortably outperform Johnson again: rather, he seemed to have grown weary of an all-out assault on the prime minister and decided to employ simple logic in an effort to get Boris to commit to something. later he might regret it. And in that he was extremely effective. Because it will be in just a month when Johnson will realize how much trouble he has unknowingly got into. Although whether it will matter is another matter. Like all narcissists, Boris lives only for the moment.
The Labor leader opened with a simple question: how can a region that is placed at level 3 come out? Simple, said Boris. When the infection rate falls below one. Good, Starmer replied. Except, based on current evidence, there were no signs that the R rate would fall below 1 any time soon. Only Cornwall and possibly the Isle of Wight currently had a lower infection rate than Manchester when the Tier 2 measures went into effect in July. And we all knew where Manchester was now.
Furthermore, there were no guarantees that the regions that had been included in level 3 would be much better than before. Even the medical director and senior scientific advisor had said that level 3 restrictions would not be enough to reduce the infection rate. And since it had already been shown that almost all Tier 2 regions would inevitably end up at Tier 3, the government was simply racking up months of agony without an exit plan.
This was the kind of simple logic that invariably beats Johnson, and his telltale shitty tics kicked in. The screaming, the waving of the arms, and the needy looks at their own benches. “Um …” Boris said. He checked each region every 28 days. Before putting it precisely where it was. Why else would he have been negotiating a six-month deal for Manchester if he had imagined there was a cat in hell chance that the region would ease its restrictions before then?
“Ah, Manchester,” Starmer said easily. The prime minister who could spend £ 40 million on a non-existent garden bridge and spend £ 6,000 a day on test and trace consultants could not seem to find £ 5 million for Manchester. Nonsense, Boris said. Conservatives were single-nation conservatives who united the country by pitting one council against another. Labor simply wanted to shut everything down with a circuit break for months and months. AKA two or three weeks. At this, Starmer logged out. History would prove that one of them was right in a couple of months. And he was totally sure that he would be chosen by history. Sometimes the long game was worth playing.
Relieved that he had come off more lightly than he expected (spotting problems on the runway has never been his strong suit), Boris became completely delusional when three London Labor MPs and a Conservative challenged him about Transport for London’s proposed reorganization. and the responsibilities of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. It was worse than hearing a child explain how the dog ate his homework. Worthy of shame.
It was also revealing just how personal Johnson’s hatred for Khan is. He can’t stand the fact that Sadiq is more popular in London than he is, nor can he stand that Khan has done an indisputably better job than as mayor of London. So Boris went into overdrive in which one lie was immediately overtaken by another. Sadiq had bankrupted the city, he was personally responsible for the damage to Hammersmith Bridge, at least when your own bridge is only in your imagination, you cannot do any harm to it, and Londoners deserved all that lay ahead. make their lives more miserable for having supported him.
Neither of which was true. According to TfL’s accounts, since Khan replaced Johnson in 2016, he has cut the deficit by 71% and increased cash reserves by 16%. The fact that TfL is now in trouble is entirely due to the pandemic. Not even Johnson’s own MPs could bear these lies. Asking for the country’s confidence during a national crisis when you can’t even tell the truth about an audited balance is an uphill struggle. If the prime minister lies about this, what will he not lie about?
However, Johnson was not done. Before the opposition day’s debate on Marcus Rashford’s proposals to extend free school meals during the holidays until Easter, Boris was asked twice to take the proposals seriously. Twice he refused.
What he had just discovered about children was that they didn’t really need to eat during school holidays. His metabolisms stopped. And furthermore, starving was the kind of character-building quality the country would need in a post-Brexit and post-Covid world. He was as crude as with tin ears. Johnson has already surrendered to Rashford once and will likely be forced to do so again soon. But when it’s programmed to erase all the glitches from its memory, these are the kinds of mistakes it makes.
