Now we know why Boris jumped before he was pushed

Boris Johnson has plunged, in semi-tragic Shakespearean fashion, from being his party’s greatest asset to its most gruesome liability. He lied and he lied again, writes Sean O’Grady

BoJo is a liar, and now, at last, it’s official. Not just a liar, but an historic, world-class, professional heavyweight, industrial-grade, “how does he do it?”, super-strength, Guinness Book of Records, compulsive, pathological, the-boy-can’t-help-it scale of liar.

If the albino greased piglet hadn’t skipped the Commons just before the Committee of Privileges he’d have been given a 90-day suspension. That is a colossal penalty imposed by this committee of politicians – with a Tory majority – and pretty much unprecedented, and certainly for a former prime minister. He was fortunate not to have been expelled from the House. In the end he expelled himself first – jumped just as they were ready to push him over the edge.

No matter: He’s still heading for oblivion. This is really something he can’t come back from. Literally, in fact, in the sense that they’ve been taken his complimentary parliamentary pass from him, so he can no longer enter the Palace of Westminster without let or hindrance. It’s jaw-dropping stuff. There’s no recovery from this. “The game’s up” as he’s reportedly said.

• Read our live coverage of reaction to the Partygate report here: Ex-PM’s final disgrace as lies finally laid bare

One thing that immediately occurs is that such is the scale of his disgrace that Rishi Sunak – who must be sore tired of having to deal with his predecessor’s abiding mess – could use it to quite reasonably justify expelling Johnson from the Tory party. He won’t, of course, because Sunak isn’t strong enough to face down the deluded Bring Back Boris brigade, but now is a chance to do the right thing by the country and party; and to show that Sunak has got the courage to do the right thing.

If he wants to stamp his authority on his querulous unruly mob of a party now is a rare moment of opportunity. Certainly, Sunak can’t go around calling Keir Starmer “Sir Softy” when Starmer kicked Corbyn out while Sunak just lets Johnson jog on spraying conspiracy theories around with relative impunity. Johnson has plunged, in semi-tragic Shakespearean fashion, from being his party’s greatest asset to its most gruesome liability.

Johnson has long since ceased to be a winner. When the researchers assemble their focus groups of voters and ask them to talk about Johnson they collate the findings the word that always jumps out is "liar". That is not the sort of figure you would now want in any public role, if you were a party leader. Indeed, Johnson’s manifest moral shortcomings, knowingly sending ministers out to lie for him about Chris Pincher, were the very reason Sunak quit as chancellor a year ago, and set in train the events that have led us to this sorry denouement. The sooner the Conservatives put Johnson behind them, the sooner they can end the psychodrama and begin the process of rebuilding.

The Committee, appropriately, haven’t bothered in this case with the usual sort of weaselly parliamentary euphemisms to describe the behaviour of the right honourable gentleman. It’s now on the record that he has been punished for “repeated contempts and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process, by:

• Deliberately misleading the House
• Deliberately misleading the Committee
• Breaching confidence
• Impugning the Committee and thereby undermining the democratic process of the House
• Being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the Committee.”

In other words, his appearance before the Committee and his subsequent absurd attacks on it as a conspiracy to reverse Brexit actually made matters worse for him. He lied and then lied again to try and extricate himself from the web he had spun for himself. Not for the first time he reminds one of the earthy words of President Truman on one his successors, the notoriously gifted but mendacious Richard Nixon: “Richard Nixon is a no-good, lying bastard…he can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and even if he caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in."

Parliament has delivered a shocker of a verdict on him but, on the other hand Johnson has always exploited the natural human tendency to believe what one is told, at least most of the time. "If in trouble lie, and sort it out later" has been his private motto. It's a technique that used to serve him well. As has been well-chronicled, he’s done the same to wives and girlfriends, to his schoolmasters at Eton, to the editors he wrote for, to every party leader he’s unfaithfully served since Michael Howard, to colleagues, to parliament, and to the British public over Brexit, partygate, Pincher and other scandals. He lied to the Queen about the unlawful prorogation of parliament in 2019. But now the truth itself has proved his nemesis. Richly deserved.