Drugs and Jimmy Savile: The best the PM could do after Sue Gray’s report was sound like a pub loon

It had been confirmed that the police are investigating potential criminal behaviour in his own Downing Street flat, and Boris Johnson’s response was to repeat an absurd, untrue conspiracy theory that’s been doing the rounds on Facebook for years

“Keir Starmer failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile and the Labour front bench take drugs.”

This was the very best Boris Johnson had. It had been confirmed that the police are investigating potential criminal behaviour in his own Downing Street flat, and his response was to repeat an absurd, untrue conspiracy theory that’s been doing the rounds on Facebook for years.

These two accusations really happened. Johnson’s response to a devastating, and devastatingly accurate attack on his complete lack of moral character from Keir Starmer really was to accuse him of failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile.

It was the deranged gibbering of a pub loon. Later, when asked if there was a culture of drug taking in Downing Street, he suggested the inquiry be “put to the Labour front bench”. A preposterous and outrageous insinuation to which no response was forthcoming.

That only a sanitised fraction of Sue Gray’s findings were published in the end – and Johnson still conspired to turn it into a devastating afternoon for himself – does not bode well for him.

Johnson’s continued rise to the very top of public life has been caused by one thing. That his charismatic clown act be so overblown, and so overwhelming, that the character within is concealed. That the public can look upon him and see a hilarious uncle, and not see what everybody who actually knows him, or who has merely spent a short amount of time properly observing him can see.

A serial liar. A moral degenerate. A man, in short, who cannot even provide a straight answer to the question, “how many children do you have?”

And what is at stake – for Boris Johnson, and for the Conservatives, in this Downing Street party saga – is not who did what and when and how bad was it. The question is whether it will make it impossible for Johnson to continue to conceal his true self from the people who voted for him, two and a half years ago. And it is very clear to see that it has done exactly that.

It is not normal, at all, that a leader of the opposition can stand at the despatch box of the House of Commons and, surrounded on all sides by hushed silence, say such things, as follows: “Prime minister, the British public aren’t fools.

They never believed a word of it. They think the prime minister should do the decent thing and resign. Of course, he won’t. Because he is a man without shame.”

It is not normal for Labour to savage a Conservative prime minister with the words of Margaret Thatcher.

“The first duty of government is to uphold the law. If it tries to bob and weave and duck around that duty when it is inconvenient, then so will the governed,” Starmer reminded him she had once said.

It was also excruciatingly telling that this meticulous and brutalising speech, by far Starmer’s finest since becoming Labour leader, was met on the government benches with nothing but quiet and panicked reverence. They knew he was right.

All Johnson could do, in the two hours of questions that followed, was repeat that we now must wait for the police enquiry, just as we have spent the last three weeks waiting for the Sue Gray report. We have not had the Sue Gray report, Gray has made that clear in the 12-page document she has published.

It is merely an update, though her conclusions are damning enough. That people around the country, notably in hospitals, endured far greater working pressures that 10 Downing Street. They were not given a free pass to break the rules. Nor did they make them.

What is occasionally hard to see is that this is not a court case. There is no moment at which Johnson will be found guilty or innocent (though he may yet receive a small fine for breaking rules). The question falls only to the MPs of his own party, and it is, in essence the same question that the public will be asked in a couple of years’ time.

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Do they want to be led by a man who, it is overwhelmingly clear to see, has broken his own rules and then lied about it? Do they still think Johnson is their best option? Who knows what goes on in the heads of Tory MPs. On Monday afternoon’s evidence, in very many cases, very little at all. But it would be very surprising indeed if they can’t see what the public surely now can, which is the real Johnson.

The glare of the public spotlight under which prime ministers live is piercing indeed. In lesser jobs, you can live many decades in public life without revealing very much at all of who you really are. Just ask Gordon Brown, or Theresa May. And neither of them were trying to pull an act of deception on Johnson’s scale.

That act is over now. The curtain has been pulled back. The clown is dead, and the snake that lies beneath isn’t as crafty or as venomous as he thinks he is. Conservatives can’t kid themselves for very much longer. They shall have to ask themselves whether this weird, pathetic spectacle is the best they’ve got. On this evidence, they would be wise to panic sooner rather than later.