Boris Johnson’s ‘partygate’ pantomime neglects Ukraine crisis and cost of living fears – Bernard Ingham

They are serving up round-the-clock entertainment, full of boos, catcalls and “look who’s behind you” – or not, as the case may be.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber would have filled his pandemic-depleted pockets had he chosen to sponsor this spectacle.

It is pantomime and farce all rolled into one with matinees in the Commons, evening shows on TV and all retailed for breakfast by a gleeful media.

We’ve all heard of silly seasons, but they usually come in midsummer. This unseasonable one takes the biscuit.

I write as one who, as a former No 10 press secretary, had his moments with MPs and has no illusions about their capacity – especially Tories – for panic, paranoia, disloyalty and a willingness to believe any old rope if it serves their mutinous purpose.

But the present lot make me wonder – yet again – how on earth anybody could have described Tory MPs as steadfast as the Brigade of Guards?

It is all being played out against the background of Russia’s threatened invasion of the Ukraine, Western leadership at its weakest since the Second World War, a world economy ravaged by the dreaded lurgi, rising inflation and horrendous national debt.

How can politics in a democracy have been brought so dangerously low?

In the UK the answer is scarcely believable in the light of world events: the propensity for No 10 to have relaxing “bring-your-own-booze” drinks in the garden, and a birthday party for Boris Johnson, after locking down the nation to varying degrees because of Covid.

They were, of course, tempting fate, given the public’s sensitivity to any appearance of one law for the privileged and another for the great unwashed.

The machine failed itself and cannot be surprised at the public’s indignation as the police now investigate some parties.

But I suspect loads of hypocrisy about the criticism, notwithstanding the heroic response of the majority to Covid restrictions.

It defies all reason to suppose there were no office drinks elsewhere among those few staff not working from home.

Meanwhile, we await the denouement.

Will investigator Sue Gray’s report force the somewhat cavalier Prime Minister out of No 10 or allow him to continue tackling a portfolio of challenges not faced by a single PM since Winston Churchill?

Whether Houdini gets away with it or not, both he and his party will have to live down the past few months of relative trivia.

It is not just greenhorn Tory MPs such as Bury South’s Christian Wakeford, who has made a fool of himself by defecting to Labour, or the sheer naivete of those who whine about “blackmail” by those trying to keep them in line.

The whole Parliamentary party has revealed a distressing lack of judgment as the problems pile up.

Many of them have behaved with the self-obsession of the teachers’ unions during the pandemic and now the public sector unions in resisting an order to return to the office.

They have nothing to offer except trouble – just like Labour, the Greens, the SNP, the Welsh Nationalists and the Liberal Democrats.

Perhaps the Tories mislead themselves into thinking that since Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is so ineffective they must keep the Government on the straight and narrow.

But that stretches the imagination when the Brexiteers among them, along with Dominic Cummings, the PM’s vindictive former chief advisor credited with securing our exit from Europe, are quickening the blood of Remainers who see Boris’s demise as a chance to return to the diktats of Brussels.

As for those who have submitted – or now withdrawn – letters of no confidence in the PM to the chairman of the 1922 Committee, they display a sort of cruel uncertainty that diverts governments from serious current issues such as the threat to world peace and the plight of the weak and elderly in an inflationary Britain.

In truth, I hope I do not sound priggish when I suggest that the Westminster pantomime displays a worrying lack of moral responsibility.

It runs from a failure, through self-indulgence, to acknowledge we live in dangerous times to an apparent willingness to continue piling financial burdens on our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A responsible politician would 
today be content to box Boris’s ears for attending an office party or turning a blind eye to others during health restrictions and concentrate on essentials – protecting the realm, the currency, the weak and maintaining law and order. In the name of God, no more pantomime.

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