At the end of a day of embarrassment and existential despair for the Tories, two cabinet members quit
Photograph: Peter Nicholls/ReutersPhotograph: Peter Nicholls/Reutersou’d have thought ministers would have learned by now not to open their mouths to the media without their lawyers being present. Come to think of it, they might also want to have their lawyers around when they are being briefed by the prime minister on what they are expected to say. After all, lying is second nature to Boris Johnson: he thinks nothing of misinforming friends, family and colleagues as well as the rest of us.
In the space of only an hour, Raab had had to pivot from an aggressive denial of any wrongdoing on Johnson’s part – “he hadn’t known anything about anything and anyone who said different was a liar” – to the sullen admission that he didn’t know entirely what was going on. But he was still sure that Pincher was basically a nice guy and he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
Nor could Dom offer any other intelligent signs of life. Much as he tried, he could not force his synapses to connect. He didn’t know what he didn’t know himself. And he had no explanation for why he had never thought to question Pincher’s appointment as deputy chief whip, despite surely having known about the proven allegations against him. It just hadn’t felt that big a deal, he seemed to imply. Besides, every groper deserved a seventh chance.
There was widespread laughter throughout the opposition benches as Ellis gave the most idiotic explanation yet of Johnson’s appointments’ procedure. It was like this. Johnson had been made aware of some allegations against Pincher in 2019 – he declined to mention the ones that Carrie “With Friends Like These etc” Johnson herself might have raised – but he had just unfortunately happened to have forgotten all about them. It was like something out of Little Britain.
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