Tell us something we didn’t know. One of the comforts – or disappointments, according to your taste – of Dominic Cummings’ 7,000-word blog, published online shortly before prime minister’s questions, is finding that everybody behaved exactly as you would expect. So when we learn that Boris Johnson thought Matt Hancock was “totally fucking hopeless” in the early months of the pandemic, that the government was too slow to lockdown and that Johnson himself was useless at chairing meetings, preferring instead to avoid all confrontation before leaving the room singing Rule, Britannia!, it hardly comes as any great shock. Good though the detail may be. Still, some of it might have made a nice final dig for Keir Starmer at PMQs but instead the Labour leader chose to focus on the Delta variant. Or the Johnson variant as some in the opposition have taken to calling it. Did the prime minister now accept that he was, in large part, responsible for the country remaining in lockdown after 21 June? It had been his decision to keep the border with India open three weeks after he had stopped all flights from Pakistan and Bangladesh at a time when both countries were showing similar high rates of infection. Johnson did what he always does when put under pressure. He blustered and lied. First he accused Starmer of using a “retrospectoscope” and tried to claim the Labour leader had got muddled up between the Delta and the Kappa variant. As though the coronavirus gave a toss what Greek letter it was named after. The whole point had been that Boris had been desperate to keep travel between the UK and India open for as long as possible so that his official visit could go ahead. And in the time up till 23 April when all flights were cancelled, 20,000 passengers had flown into the UK.
“We have the strongest borders in the world,” Johnson boasted, providing no evidence to back up this claim. Principally because there wasn’t any. Starmer huffed and puffed but there is no provision within the current PMQs format to ensure that the prime minister answers the question. Or even that he should do so truthfully. And Boris doesn’t care that people know he’s lying, because even his own MPs seem happy for him to do so. A liar’s gotta do, what a liar’s gotta do. The Tories knew what they were buying when they chose him as leader and, as the Cummings blog shows, he’s not about to have a personality change. The irony is that the same MPs are outraged at perceived breaches of faith from other parties and countries, yet are blind to the more obvious failings of their own man. Listening to Johnson talk about the freedom of the press in response to the SNP’s Ian Blackford’s question about the intimidation of the BBC’s Nick Watt was to slip through the looking-glass. After all, it had been Boris who had promised he would see what he could do to frighten off a journalist who was investigating his friend, Darius Guppy. Johnson also chose not to answer Blackford’s question about why he had kept a health secretary in place whom he had deemed to be hopeless and instead provided some misleading information about the Australian trade deal that would leave UK farmers less well off and increase GDP by just 0.02%. A short while later, Johnson and Starmer resumed their exchanges when the prime minister gave a statement on the G7 and Nato summits. To listen to Boris, you’d have thought he’d brought peace to the free world, eliminated the coronavirus and cut carbon emissions to net zero. It took the Labour leader to inject a dose of reality. It had been a nice spa weekend – a bonding session – on the Cornish coast and little more. The G7 had agreed things that had already been agreed, and hadn’t had a clue where the 10bn other vaccine doses to protect the world were coming from. Worse, Boris had alienated EU leaders by refusing to accept a Northern Ireland protocol that he himself had agreed. Maybe they should have checked his record on keeping promises before expecting better. “He was a host not a leader, a tour guide not a statesman” was Starmer’s damning conclusion. Even some Tories seemed to nod at that.
But on a day of ironies the biggest one was left to last. For who should the government send out to lead the debate on extending the lockdown restrictions for a further four weeks than Hancock. The minister whom even Boris thought was completely fucking hopeless. Still, not even Door Matt could screw this one up as Labour was supporting the government, though he did seem to think the appearance of the Delta variant had been a total mystery that couldn’t have been expected by anyone. Just give us four more weeks, Hancock said, and we’ll be back to normal. Data not dates no longer appears to be government policy. Even this, though, was not enough to placate the hardcore of the Covid Recovery Group. Mark Harper and Steve Brine sought assurances that no restrictions would remain in place after 19 July, something Matt was happy to give: even though it was obviously hogwash. Steve Baker ticked off the health secretary for raising unrealistic hopes by hinting that lockdown might end in two weeks. Couldn’t he have just stuck to four weeks to prevent yet more disappointment? But the two most out-there contributions came from Desmond Swayne and Charles “pint of milk” Walker. Swayne insisted the emergency was over and that the continued lockdown was a repressive, dystopian vision that went against every English person’s right to die. Walker agreed, arguing that either members of Sage reveal their financial status or be banned from talking to the media. So much for an open democracy … Door Matt sucked it up, his face frozen behind a union jack mask, as he waited for the ordeal to end. On days like this, being completely fucking hopeless was more than good enough.