How much must Boris Johnson hate Michael Ellis? There again, how much must Michael Ellis hate Michael Ellis? It takes a special kind of person to volunteer to be the prime minister’s fall guy. Someone with even a trace of self-respect might have looked wistfully at the lateral flow test, inked on a second red line and made himself unavailable. Not the delusional Ellis. He was at his master’s beck and call: ready at all times to defend the totally indefensible in an act of imagined nobility. All he asked for in return was a knighthood for this and previous acts of slavish devotion to Johnson. It should, of course, have been Johnson who came to the Commons to answer the urgent question. After all, it was his party, in his garden, that he couldn’t remember attending. Short-term memory loss is beginning to look like the only excuse he has got. Feasible or not. But Boris has never been one to clean up his own shit. The MO of the Pikachu-lookalike with the toddler haircut has always been to generate chaos and let others take the rap. So brave. But with Johnson holed up in the Downing Street flat and refusing to come out, it was Ellis, the junior minister with the non-job of paymaster general, who was forced to show his face. Again. Only last December, he had been made to answer a previous UQ on other Downing Street parties and that hadn’t gone well, with his oily disposition and evasive answers attracting widespread derision from the opposition benches. Tuesday’s performance was pretty much a re-run of the first. Only with even less credibility as no one in the chamber seemed in any doubt about Johnson’s guilt. Ellis began by saying how sorry he was that the “allegations had arisen”. Not that the party had taken place, while the rest of the country were obeying the rules and some were being denied a last goodbye to their loved ones. Just sorry that someone had seen fit to blow the whistle on the gathering. It was already getting downgraded from a party. But that was all he could say because it would be wrong to prejudge Sue Gray’s investigation. After all, it was possible that during the course of her inquiry she would find Boris had been doing something completely different from what everyone thought he had been doing and so accidentally exonerated him. So there was no point anyone bothering to ascertain the truth because there was a half chance that Gray might fall for whatever lies the prime minister eventually came up with. A few Labour MPs clapped ironically. None of which went down with Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader. Her voice was laced with equal parts anger and scorn as she demanded some proper answers. Had the prime minister been at the party or not? That was surely a binary question which it should be easy to answer without a formal investigation. “He can run but he can’t hide,” she said. Which was not strictly true. He can barely even walk these days. Rayner ended by asking if Ellis still believed the prime minister to be a man of honour. Astonishingly, Ellis did. Though no one else did. Not even the handful of Tories who had bothered to show their faces for the government’s total humiliation. Desmond Swayne wondered if the Downing Street parties showed that everyone would have been better off being allowed to do what they wanted all along. Christopher Chope wished that all the dirty linen had been washed in one go rather than drip fed. Duh! There’s way too much of it for that. Maria Miller rather timidly suggested that maybe the debate should have been delayed until Gray had been given a chance to have a memory lapse and exonerate Johnson, but that was about as good as it got for Ellis. “I have the full support of the government,” said the ever-so-oily Ellis, apparently unaware that the frontbench was entirely empty apart from a lone whip, who had been sent to keep him company and was doing his best to pretend he wasn’t there. From time to time, he looked pleadingly up at the speaker, desperate to be put out of his misery. Most UQs only run for 45 minutes, but for this one Lindsay Hoyle was prepared to make an exception and go into 30 minutes overtime. If Johnson wouldn’t turn up then he’d make his understudy suffer. It was a punishment beating, with opposition MPs quoting the fury of their constituents and asking questions to which Ellis could only recite the same useless non-answer. “It would be wrong to prejudge the inquiry,” he said time and again. And time and again, he would be told that all the house wanted was confirmation that Boris had been at the party. Surely Ellis had asked him that before he had agreed to cover up for him? “I couldn’t possibly disclose private conversations,” he said, grandly. At which point his last remaining shred of self-worth shrivelled up and died. He was now a mere carapace, masquerading as sentient life. Ellis was not the only one having a bad day defending Johnson. The junior health minister, Edward Argar, had drawn the short straw of the morning media round and had been unable to explain anything to anyone. Not even why Boris needed an inquiry to tell him what he had been doing. Mostly Argar was left talking nonsense before deciding enough was enough and it was time to cover his own back. He definitely had been to no parties. He had spent all the last two years on Zoom. He definitely knew nothing. The more he spoke, the less convincing he sounded. But the prize for real stupidity went to Tory backbencher Michael Fabricant. No one had asked him to help, obviously, because he’s a perennial liability. But he volunteered anyway. The party wasn’t a party, it was just a group of workmates having a party. Thud. The sound of one wig clapping. Boris was just bewildered to find so many people in his garden. Thud. They deserved a party because they had been working so hard. Thud. With friends like these ... Still, at least we got one answer. For years, people have wondered what the point of Micky F was. Now we knew. To make third-raters like Ellis look smart.