Boris Johnson looked more prime suspect than prime minister at his Partygate hearing

The ex-PM trying to lie his way out of being a liar is too much, even for him

At 2pm, into a de facto courtroom in Westminster, walked the world’s worst liar.

Rather unluckily for him, he was on trial for lying, and had very little choice but to spend the next three-and-a-half hours trying to lie his way out of it. And though the consequences were predictable, they were no less spectacular for it.

It wasn’t actually a court case, even though the defendant, Boris Johnson, had to place his hands on the King James bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The bible is rarely off the top of the world bestseller lists. You have to wonder quite what this particular copy, of the billions available, had done to deserve this. You have to hope that someone gave it a good wipe down after, ideally with a strong disinfectant.

He was the prime minister once. Now the prime suspect. At least for a few minutes anyway, after which all suspicion turned to absolute certainty.

The privileges committee could hardly have done more to cloak the occasion with the outward resemblance of a criminal procedure, even though it was technically barely more than an HR hearing.

There was, of course, the defendant. There were also the witness statements, the expensive lawyers (two hundred grand, on the public purse naturally), and the judge, Harriet Harman.

There were even TV screens for video evidence. At this point, my notes say “all that’s missing were the wigs”, but then I looked up to see I was sitting right behind Michael Fabricant. A little handful of Johnson’s cheerleaders had turned up to sit behind him all afternoon for moral support. Nice work if you can get it, which they can – for about another year.

In the breathless buildup, there is scarcely a news outlet that didn’t describe Johnson as “fighting for his political life”. It’s a strange turn of phrase for a guy who was kicked out of 10 Downing Street six months ago, by his own party, for lying.

That in any sane world, is when a political life dies. Whether or not a parliamentary committee also concludes that he’s a liar and that therefore he might be forcibly removed from a parliamentary seat he’s going to lose next year and is already trying to connive his way out of and into another, should hardly matter.

It’s not entirely clear whether the public need to see the Johnson character laid bare before them, yet again, but they certainly saw it.

It was a spectacle that has never quite been seen before. It’s by no means uncommon to see a very obviously bang-to-rights defendant telling futile lies to survive, but rarely are they on trial for lying.

It was like watching a man facing 14 counts of burglary being brought into court wearing an eye mask and a black-and-white striped T-shirt, and then protesting his innocence while simultaneously going about the court room loading other people’s possessions into his bag marked SWAG.

Pablo Escobar, to the best of my knowledge, did not attempt to sell the judge a few grams of gear.

Johnson, naturally, did his best to complicate what is actually a very simple process. He was not, not today anyway, being accused of breaking any Covid rules (the police have already done him for that), but simply for knowingly misleading the House of Commons.

At the start, they played on the video screens all of the many times that, in the eyes of any sane person, he had clearly done exactly that. There is a certain amount of complexity shrouding the staggeringly obvious, but on one occasion, the most outrageous one, is when he simply said: “I have been repeatedly assured that in 10 Downing Street the guidance was followed at all times.”

No one believed that when he said it, and it’s even more laughable now. He went to unbelievable length, quite literally, to explain what he meant when he said that. That assertion had come a week after the emergence of the video of Allegra Stratton, cracking-up laughing while practising whether she could possibly come up with any kind of defence that wasn’t absurd and realising that she couldn’t.

He had, he said, asked his director of communications, Jack Doyle, who had been at the party, whether any rules had been broken and he said they hadn’t, and so that was fine.

This really was his defence at a cost of two hundred grand of taxpayer cash. It was clear to absolutely everyone in the country, that a rule breaking party had very obviously occurred in 10 Downing Street – why else would Allegra Stratton find it so hilarious? – so what he’d done was, he’d gone to ask someone who was actually there, who had therefore broken the law themselves, and who maybe didn’t want to admit that to their boss who is also the prime minister, and he’d said, “did anyone break the rules” and he said “no” and so that was fine.

On this conceit, Johnson reckons, the whole fabric of government rests. He’d already claimed in writing, and this time he said it out loud, that if prime ministers can’t trust their trusted advisers, you can’t govern the country. That the committee were, in other words, putting the country in danger. And so, if a member of your staff who really does appear to have both organised and attended an illegal party then tells you he hasn’t, well, if you can’t believe that then it’s going to be anarchy on the streets.

All the way through this, Harman’s eyes had been narrowing in impossible slow motion. It was like one of those space action movies where the escape hatch of the rocket ship closes and closes. By the time she came to speak, you would have struggled to squeeze a one-ply tissue through the gaps between her eyelids.

When she spoke, she expressed a certain amount of surprise, specifically that Johnson had claimed that “he had been assured that the guidance had been followed at all times” when he had, himself, attended a bring your own booze party in his own garden. She made the rather simple point that a trained baboon could have made. That the evidence of your own eyes and ears should trump the assurances you’ve been given by other people. That, she said: “If you drive at 100mph, and you can see the speedometer, and it says 100, that is more important than any assurances you might later receive that you were only going at 90.”

Ah, but no. The defendant did a little proto-lunge forward with his shoulders. How wrong she was. When he’d said, “I have been repeatedly assured that the guidance was followed at all times,” he was speaking only with regard to the Allegra Stratton video. The bring your own booze party hadn’t even become public knowledge by that point.

So that, apparently, is fine. That was the defence. Of course I was telling the truth because I was, no one even knew what it was I was lying about.

The popular philosopher Malcolm Gladwell wrote a popular book, quite a while ago, that absolutely anyone can master absolutely anything, as long as they do it for 10,000 hours. It has always been a questionable assertion, but no one can have done more to demolish it than Johnson. The man is nearly 60. He has been lying all of his adult and quite probably child life, to absolutely everyone he has ever encountered, and yet he remains so staggeringly bad at it.

It was, at times, gloriously amusing, not least as the stakes are now quite small. Johnson is no longer an embarrassment to anyone but himself. But it is very important to remember that there are millions of people who don’t find anything about it even remotely funny. While he spoke, people inevitably tweeted.

To take but one example, as he talked through the notorious photograph of himself, raising a toast at a leaving do for a Downing Street aide on 20 November 2020, a member of the public was on the internet explaining that that was the day his child was born, the day his wife endured her labour alone, and he was whisked out of the maternity ward after the 15 minutes he was allowed to be there. They were Boris Johnson’s rules, and here he was, telling a committee investigating him for lying, that he legitimiately believed that leaving drinks “were essential for work purposes”.

It was explained to him that a particularly raucous party, which he hadn’t attended, but which at least 25 to 40 people had, had occurred in his direct line of sight, outside the vestibule to his private flat, which he would have had to pass through to get home.

“I didn’t look,” he said.

As the hours ticked by, he became more and more agitated. It was just too much. Despite the years and years of practice, having to lie your way out of lying was simply too much for him. There was nowhere to go. Which does rather pose the question: what happens when a man charged with knowingly misleading parliament, knowingly misleads parliament, which is precisely what he spent all afternoon doing. Does the committee now have to investigate him for misleading the committee? And then again. And again? Could this be his fate and all of ours? An infinity mirror of Boris Johnson’s lies, traipsing for evermore up and down the Escher stairs covered in his own very obvious bulls***?

Trouble is, he could have as many infinities as he likes to practise, and still no one would believe a word of it.