‘He is not Churchill’: Spanish media condemns Boris Johnson over lockdown parties

An editorial in El País says the British PM is a ‘drinker like Churchill, but without being Churchill’

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stops to look at a bust of Winston Churchill during a trip to Washington in September 202 (Getty Images)

Boris Johnson may drink like Winston Churchill but that is where the comparison ends, according to a withering verdict in Spain’s leading newspaper El País.

The Madrid-based paper is the latest outlet to criticise the British leader from overseas following the so-called ‘Partygate’ scandal which has seen a dozen government events being investigated by police for potential lockdown breaches.

Not content with comparing him unfavourably to his political hero, El País also attacks Mr Johnson because he “laughs at his own rules like a monarch alien to his people”.

In an editorial titled, “Johnson: A drinker like Churchill, but without being Churchill”, author Berna Gonzalez Harbor criticises the PM for his rule-breaking.

“Johnson has failed because he has broken the very rules he has approved for everyone. As an absolute sovereign outside the rule of law, his law, he imposed harsh restrictions on citizens while he mocked everyone by breaching them in his own house,” she wrote on Thursday.

The piece concluded: “But Johnson has failed not by drinking, but by failing to comply. And because he is not Churchill.”

For the Spanish media, the context of constant work drinks in the UK has been hard to fathom.

Rafa de Miguel, the UK correspondent for El País, told Politico that although his editors were unsurprised by Mr Johnson’s rule-breaking, they did not understand why civil servants would be drinking so much wine.

He said: “One of the things that my editors asked of me, from the very beginning of this scandal, was to try to explain what this drinking culture was that they were constantly referring to in the British media.

“And it is a little bit hard to explain when people have not lived here. You don’t have people in the government headquarters ending the day with a bottle of wine in Spain.”

In the editorial, the paper condemned Mr Johnson as a hindrance, not just for the Conservative Party, but for “all of British society”. It described the prime minister’s performance in Wednesday’s PMQs as full of “vague and fuzzy” promises and a “defiant arrogance”.

It read: “He boasted of having launched the most successful and fastest vaccination campaign in Europe, but he forgot that the death toll exceeds that of any other country on the continent”.

“Johnson is now a liability for the Conservatives, who are holding on to Downing Street on borrowed time,” it added.

File photo: British PM Boris Johnson drinks a pint of cider in Callestick, Cornwall, 27 November 2019 (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The editorial is the latest example of international criticism for Mr Johnson.

Earlier this week, the Kremlin spokesman referred to him as “utterly confused” and the Russian media said he was the “most disliked, disrespected and ridiculed character in Britain”.

Russian media said he was “completely under the control and heel of his young wife”, and that “even schoolchildren are laughing at him”.

Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy, also told Sky News that Moscow did not “trust British diplomacy”.

Mr Johnson has been facing ridicule following the release of civil servant Sue Gray’s report into Downing Street parties this week, and particular interest has being paid in the international press to the culture of “excessive” workplace drinking that Ms Gray uncovered.

An article by The New York Times leads with Ms Gray’s comments on a failure of leadership and the “damning picture of ‘excessive’ workplace drinking in the inner sanctum of the British government.” CNN even commissioned an opinion piece explaining Boris Johnson and “Britain’s drinking problem”.

A column in the French newspaper Líberation on Wednesday accused Mr Johnson of “killing the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher”.

Downing Street said that Mr Johnson “accepts Sue Gray’s general findings in full, and above all her recommendation that we must learn from these events and act now.” But said they could not add anything further “while the Met’s investigation is ongoing”.