Boris Johnson’s best party excuse is he’s even dimmer than we feared | John Crace

Finally we got some kind of explanation from the prime minister for his boozy parties at Downing Street. It turns out that Boris Johnson wants us to believe that Boris Johnson thinks that Boris Johnson is catatonically stupid. And that the British public are equally half-witted enough to believe any old lies he happens to come up with. There’s just one problem with this. Boris may be dim, but he’s not that dim. And the rest of us have long since learned to see through his mendacity.

This was the prime minister’s questions at which Johnson finally ran out of road. An outright denial that he had been at the party on 20 May 2020 would no longer keep him out of trouble as there was anecdotal evidence he was there. So all that was left to him was to come up with the best possible excuse and hope it would buy off a few of the more gullible Tory MPs. Only the best possible excuse turned out to be a crock of total shit.

Here’s how it was, said Johnson, as he made a short statement to the Commons. He recognised the sacrifices the country had made and he wanted to apologise for having got pissed with No 10 staff in his own back garden.

The thing was that he had just not realised the party was a party. When the email was sent – which he definitely had not read – inviting everyone to enjoy the sunshine and to bring your own booze, the last thing he had imagined was that a party was about to take place. Even though 60 staffers had made that assumption, realised it was against the law and decided to stay away.

So anyway, he and his then fiancee – Carrie always came along to work meetings – coincidentally turned up at the party that wasn’t a party, even though they hadn’t seen the invite, and stayed for 25 minutes just because it seemed rude not to. He discussed a few work matters before going back to his flat and remembered thinking how brilliant it was that so many people were staying late to work outdoors over a few bevvies.

And he hadn’t even thought the party was a party when he saw the staff clearing up the empties from the flower bed the following morning. Indeed it was only when Dominic Cummings had mentioned last week that the party might have actually have been a party that it occurred to him the party could have been a party after all. He now bitterly regretted everything – most of all, getting caught – and all he was asking was that people gave him a bit of wriggle room before Sue Gray submitted the findings to her investigation. Hopefully she would be as gullible as he imagined everyone else to be.

None of which cut any ice with Keir Starmer. This PMQs may have seemed like the most open of goals for the Labour leader but he still needed to stick the ball in the net in front of a packed Commons’ chamber. Which he did six times. Johnson was pathetic: after months of denial, was this the best he could come up with? A dog ate my homework excuse would be less insulting. The prime minister had attended the party. He had broken lockdown rules. He had misled parliament when he had said how sickened he was about other No 10 parties. The country thought he was a pathological liar. He needed to resign.

Boris visibly crumpled. Unlike Prince Andrew, he knew what is was like to sweat. Back in No 10 he had managed to convince himself that his feeble explanation might be enough to get him off the hook. After all, he had a long history of getting out of tight situations by lying through his teeth. But now he could feel his optimism seeping away. He was fooling no one. Not even himself. He tugged at his toddler haircut in desperation. His eyes folded in on themselves to bloodshot pinpricks.

The king of bullshitters was all out of ideas. Even he could see how abject his lies were. He willed himself not to exist. To be elsewhere. Somewhere he wouldn’t be exposed to the starkness of his own self-hatred. His voice became strangely disconnected. Like an automaton. Without effect. He could only express his regret at the way events had panned out. A narcissist can’t do empathy and can only feel sorry for himself. And this was ultimately his tragedy. His fall from grace. He had never felt so exposed. Just wait for Sue Gray. Hope that she dematerialises.

Rishi Sunak had made himself scarce in Devon. “I’m right behind you, prime minister. 200 miles behind you.” The rest of the cabinet stared impassively at the floor, their expressions hidden behind their masks. They too would rather have been anywhere but the Commons. This was also their humiliation. They were the ones who had put a man transparently unfit to be prime minister into No 10. They knew what Boris was like but hadn’t cared. His incompetence and corruption was also theirs.

The Tory backbenchers were also out of sorts. No one could bring themselves to actually defend their leader; but neither did they dare attack him. His immorality cast a toxic pall over proceedings. Boris was the turd that would not flush and which no one dared mention. So instead they asked him about irrelevant details of constituency business. A county motto. It was all somewhat surreal.

It was left to Labour’s Chris Bryant to get the last word. How stupid did he think we all were? Did he really imagine even a 10-year-old thinking he would get away with lines like that? And would it yet again be people, like Allegra Stratton, who had worked for Boris that would end up losing their jobs? Johnson shrugged, still a semi-absentee observer of his own downfall. Needs must. If that’s what it took for him to survive. It was a fight to the death. Whose exactly would soon become clear.