Boris Johnson and his trouble with the truth

Boris Johnson has been urged to “come clean” about his awareness of complaints against Chris Pincher when appointing him deputy chief whip earlier this year.

Pincher, the MP for Tamworth, resigned from the role last week and was suspended from the party over groping allegations. Questions were raised about why he had been given a job in the whips’ office in February despite other claims of inappropriate behaviour.

Downing Street initially said the prime minister was not aware of any specific allegations about Pincher at the time, but then changed its line to say allegations had been “either resolved or did not progress to a formal complaint”. A spokesman described them as “unsubstantiated”.

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But Lord McDonald, a former senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, wrote to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Stone, saying: “This is not true.”

Johnson was “briefed in person” about an investigation into a “formal complaint” against Pincher in 2019, he said. The allegations “were ‘resolved’ only in the sense that the investigation was completed; Mr Pincher was not exonerated”. McDonald added that “to characterise the allegations as ‘unsubstantiated’ is therefore wrong”.

‘Highly damaging letter’

The Financial Times said the “explosive allegations” from McDonald have left the PM “facing renewed accusations that he has not told the truth on a key matter of public concern”.

During a media round this morning, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said he was “not aware that the prime minister was briefed directly” about the 2019 allegation.

But the FT said the “highly damaging letter” will “infuriate ministers who have been repeatedly sent out to defend Johnson with lines that subsequently disintegrate as new evidence emerges or with an incomplete account of what the prime minister knew”.

Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dems’ deputy leader, urged the prime minister to “own up to his web of lies”, while Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said Johnson “refused to act and then lied about what he knew”.

Public perception

Even when Johnson is telling the truth, there is a perception among the public that he is not. A poll for The Times, conducted by JL Partners in April, asked nearly 2,000 people to give their view of the PM in a few words. “The most common word used was ‘liar’,” said the paper.

Another YouGov poll of 2,464 adults surveyed in the same month found that 75% thought he knowingly lied about breaking lockdown rules.

In an interview with Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts last month, Johnson was asked: “Why should we believe anything you say when it has been proven you are a habitual liar?” Roberts said it was “a pretty typical question that sums up the mood” on the forum, which has around 100 million page views a month. Johnson said he disagreed with the premise of the question and urged people to “look at the record of what I deliver”.

But the “indignity of Mumsnet questioners impugning his honesty”, as well as boos from royalists outside St Paul’s during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations “chime with polls and the public mood”, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian at the time. “No one believes him – nor that he’s working hard for us.”

Next move for Johnson

McDonald has urged No. 10 to “come clean”. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think that the language is ambiguous, the sort of telling the truth and crossing your fingers at the same time and hoping that people are not too forensic in their subsequent questioning and I think that is not working.”

Later, in the Commons, Michael Ellis, the minister for the Cabinet Office, claimed that Johnson had simply forgotten that he knew about the 2019 allegations when he was first asked about them last week.

The prime minister “did not immediately recall” the conversation about the 2019 incident, said Ellis. “As soon as he was reminded, the No. 10 press office corrected their public lines. So the position is quite clear. Further inquiries will be made, but the position is that the prime minister acted with probity at all times.”

In The Independent, Sean O’Grady said the Pincher affair has seen the “same cycle as we witnessed in the Dominic Cummings scandal, during Partygate, in the Owen Paterson affair, wallpapergate, various Brexit disasters, horrendous blunders in the pandemic, and much else.”

He predicted that “tomorrow, or next week, or next month, there’ll be a fresh imbroglio”.

Former education minister Nick Gibb is among the Tory MPs who want the cycle to stop. The PM has “lost the trust of voters and of many Conservative MPs (including me)”, he wrote in The Telegraph last night.

“Every decision seems to be about keeping enough Conservative MPs on the Prime Minister’s side – increasingly, it seems, with little regard for what is right or what is true.”