‘Hand on heart’: Boris Johnson defends himself at ‘partygate’ hearings

Aside from their personal combinations of buffoonery, difficult relationships with the truth, and attendant fondness for shielding themselves from scrutiny, Scott Morrison, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have one thing in common. The schedule of scandal they created in office was so packed, each controversy tended to blur into one another.

So it takes a second to remember that it wasn’t actually “partygate” that did for Johnson’s time as UK prime minister, but his alleged knowledge of assault allegations levelled at the man he appointed the party’s deputy whip.

Still, partygate — the revelation of several soirées at Number 10, politicians and staffers getting tipsy and breaking the pandemic lockdown legislation Johnson himself introduced, while ordinary Britons were unable to visit their dying relatives — must go down as his defining scandal, the moment from which there was no return.

This week Johnson faced a committee of MPs looking into whether he intentionally misled Parliament about those parties.

Opening the hearing, he swore an oath on the Bible and declared that “hand on heart, I did not lie to the House”, insisting that while he misled the House, it was unintentional, and he corrected the record as soon as it was practical: “I take full responsibility for what happened on my watch.”

It all went… well, how you’d expect.

We did everything we could to follow the rules, except for all those instances we clearly didn’t

At the parties, “we avoided physical contact [ed’s note: some more rigorously than others… ], we didn’t touch each other’s … pens, we didn’t pass stuff to each other if we could possibly avoid it,” Johnson insisted, in that trademark, bumbling, posho rhythm of his.

When confronted with the fact that people were visibly passing drinks to one another in the footage, he said, as if it were so obvious as to not be worth mentioning, “of course”.

What would you have me do, change what’s currently scientifically possible?

“It is clear in Number 10 we had real difficulties … in maintaining social distancing,” Johnson said, having been shown footage of people not maintaining social distancing.

But “we had no choice but to meet”, he insisted, and he couldn’t exactly place a “force field” around everyone.

Also, are the committee sure that the brazen indifference to social distancing they think they’re seeing is actually happening? “You don’t see Perspex screens there, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t sanitiser and efforts to restrict the spread of COVID.”

Tired of experts

Johnson insisted that everything he had told MPs regarding the serial partying in his office was “in good faith and based on what I honestly believed at the time”.

Johnson became particularly miffed when asked why he hadn’t sought assurances from anyone more qualified than his communications advisers that COVID rules had been followed during the get-togethers before telling MPs that they had.

Tory MP Bernard Jenkin said, “I have to say, if I was accused of law-breaking and I had to give an undertaking to the House of Commons, of all places, that I had not broken the law, I would want the advice of a lawyer.”

Johnson replied angrily: “This is nonsense. I mean, complete nonsense. I asked the relevant people and they were senior people.”

For what it’s worth, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case denied giving Johnson any reassurances that COVID rules and guidelines were followed, and said he was unaware of anyone in Number 10 doing so.

I’m not naming any names (I don’t know any)

Indeed, Johnson was pretty vague on which officials actually gave him the broader assurance he would rely on later in Parliament: “I can’t name these officials. I don’t know if I can. I think that most of them have indicated they don’t want themselves to be named.”

Johnson has agreed to write to the committee privately with further details.

But he wasn’t always quite so tight-lipped. When there was a disagreement about the number of attendees at a going-away party for two civil servants in January 2021, Johnson started rattling off names unprompted.

“Sorry, forgive me, I shouldn’t mention the names,” he said, as the people around him buried their heads in their hands.