Boris Johnson has transformed 10 Downing Street into a private palace of lies

You start at the bottom. There you’ll find the non-party party room. That’s where 50 people who don’t exist gathered for a party that didn’t happen

A new baby is coming back there today, and it won’t be long before daddy can give it the grand tour (PA Wire)

The real question surely is why the Johnsons ever went to Peppa Pig World when they already live in a theme park entirely of the prime minister’s own making.

In a mere two-and-a-half years he has turned 10 Downing Street into his own multi-storey palace of lies. The sheer industry and creativity involved is not to be criticised, but wondered at.

It surely cannot be long before Kuennsberg, Rigby and the rest are joined outside that famous door by Kevin McCloud, as he stares down the barrel of the camera launching into a breathless soliloquy about the audacious power of brazen dishonesty. The things it can achieve. The things it can do.

A new baby is coming back there today, and it won’t be long before daddy can give it the grand tour. Each floor, each anteroom, lovingly and carefully woven with its own incredible tales that absolutely, definitely cannot be true.

You start at the bottom. There you’ll find the non-party party room. That’s where 50 people who don’t exist gathered for a party that didn’t happen. Then you head next door, into the brand spanking new £2.9m lying suite. That’s where staff gather to practice how they might go about lying their way out of having had a party that didn’t happen, before having to resign.

From there, you sweep out in to the famous garden. And it was here, little one, that a very strange man who writes very long blogs really did think he could tell an entire country that he drove his car in order to test his eyesight and expected them to believe him.

Head up a storey and you’ll find the old dining room where – and this really is an ingenious twist – I once bragged about going into hospital and shaking hands with coronavirus patients, which is the kind of thing that, if any sane person had actually done so, they definitely wouldn’t tell anyone about it, but I hadn’t, and I did.

Next door to here is a little office where I once told reporters, with a straight face, that I’d prorogued parliament for completely, ordinary, run-of-the-mill reasons. It’s maybe a bit technical for you, this one, darling. All you really need to understand for now is that I lied to the Queen.

And from here, if you’re lucky, you reach the lying antechamber, the VIP suite, the gold-walled bulls*** Valhalla. It’s not merely that lies are told here, things happen that didn’t happen, but that is actually made of lies.

It’s not merely that there have had to be two separate investigations, at taxpayer expense, of course, in to who knew what and when about who paid for the prime minister’s unimaginably expensive home refurbishments. It’s that, as of this morning, they contradict one another.

The first, by the independent advisor on standards, Lord Geidt, concluded that the prime minister didn’t know that a Tory donor called Lord Brownlow was paying for the Downing Street refurbishment. And the second, by the Electoral Commission, includes WhatsApp messages from the prime minister, to Lord Brownlow, asking for more money to cover the costs.

Naturally, Downing Street say this is all vey technical. That the “prime minister was not aware of the underlying details”. That he thought Lord Brownlow was just managing the money, not donating it. Which may or may not be true.

But, you know, “Downing Street” is not actually a person, it’s a series of spokespeople. And today they’re saying that the prime minister is “not aware of the underlying detail” and yesterday they were saying that the prime minister was “not aware” of a party that happened in his own house, and had been “repeatedly reassured” that it didn’t happen.

And a large number of the actual, physical lips from which words emerge under the banner of “Downing Street” are also widely believed to have had cheese and wine going the other way down them on 18 December 2020, at a party they still say the prime minister says didn’t happen, even though they might have been there.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

One thing that does appear to be true is that the prime minister will not be able to claim not to know about, or to have been at, another party, in the actual Golden Decepticon itself, that is widely understood to have happened on 13 November last year, and which will, we now know, form party of an investigation into what actually happened at the ever-lengthening list of parties that didn’t happen. We await the official “Downing Street” explanation for that one.

When Sir Walter Scott wrote the words “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive”, they were intended merely as as a flowery metaphor, not a cautionary tale for pathologically dishonest spiders. You can’t literally get stuck living inside your own lies. Not unless you’re Boris Johnson, anyway.