Boris Johnson allowed the cameras to enter the cabinet room on Tuesday; perhaps he would have wished they had been left out, while the lens swept a cast of sad-faced ministers, digesting the self-inflicted fiasco that threatened to overwhelm the prime minister.
Johnson’s relationship with the truth once again dominated the news, after it happened that the prime minister had been personally informed about past allegations of sexual misconduct by the now disgraced former Conservative deputy director Chris Pincher.
Within hours, Health Secretary Sajid Javid left the cabinet, followed shortly after by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, unable to serve more under a man whose values and judgment he no longer respected.
Number 10 had spent the last few days denying Johnson was aware of “specific allegations” about Pincher. So did several ministers, sent in interviews with hostile media outlets, armed by Johnson with incomplete or inaccurate versions of the truth.
“A picture paints more than a thousand words,” a senior Conservative official said, studying the morbid scene around the cabinet table. Thérèse Coffey, the secretary of labor and pensions who had been entrusted on Sunday with the unenviable task of defending Johnson, looked at the prime minister.
Dominic Raab, deputy prime minister, suffered a torrid “media wheel” on Tuesday, insisting Johnson had not been informed of Pincher’s allegations, only to find out shortly afterwards that he was not.
It is time for cabinet colleagues to acknowledge the appalling damage the prime minister is doing to the party, the government and the country.
Johnson later engaged in crisis talks with aides, as rumors of government resignations circulated. “It’s a turn of the century,” a former minister said. “It’s the combination of incompetence and dishonesty that people can’t stand.”
Johnson, like many other conflicting prime ministers before him, went to the House of Commons tea room to shake hands with his depressed lawmakers, hoping to gather support. But during the day, support was waning; Deputies reported that new letters were being drafted to send to the big conservatives, expressing no confidence in Johnson.
Pincher resigned as the team’s deputy director last Thursday after admitting he had “embarrassed” himself and others by getting drunk at a private London members ’club; he was accused of palpating two men. He was later suspended from the Conservative party.
It was up to Cabinet Office Minister Michael Ellis to explain to MPs why Downing Street had repeatedly and incorrectly insisted that the Prime Minister had not received “specific allegations” related to Pincher before turning him into vice-chief in February.
Ellis said Johnson “did not immediately recall” being told in 2019 that the cabinet office had investigated and accepted a complaint about inappropriate behavior by Pincher, who was foreign minister at the time. Once he remembered, the prime minister told the Downing Street press office.
The fact that Johnson did not recall the facts again put his official spokesman, a taxpayer-funded official to provide accurate information, in a hateful position.
At the start of the regular Westminster reporters’ session on Tuesday, the first question to Johnson’s spokesman was, “Will you tell the truth?” The spokesman said he would always seek to “provide the information available at the time of each meeting”.
Johnson’s familiarity with the truth is already the subject of an investigation by the Commons Privileges Committee, which looks at whether the prime minister deliberately misled deputies about the party scandal.
He has been fired twice for lying in his career – the first time he was fired as a journalist by the Times for making an appointment. In the second he was removed from the Conservative front seat team for lying about an extramarital affair.
Conservative Minister Lord Nicholas True read a statement in the upper house on Tuesday in which he defended the government’s commitment to high standards in public life, in which it seemed barely possible to believe what he was saying. Baroness Natalie Evans, a Conservative leader in the House of Lords, joined in the laughter.
But for cabinet ministers, Johnson’s conduct is not a matter of laughter. William Wragg, Conservative chairman of the Commons’ public administration committee and a critic of Johnson, urged them to “consider their positions.” “It’s not a matter of systems but of political judgment,” he said. “This political trial cannot be delegated.”
Caroline Johnson, a Conservative MP not known for attacking Johnson, asked the Commons why police had not investigated Pincher’s allegations in 2019, why he had not been fired at the time, and why Johnson gave him another job as the deputy director.
Johnson’s admission that he knew of Pincher’s allegations was followed by an intervention by Lord Simon McDonald, the former Foreign Office official, who accused Downing Street of hiding the truth.
Even among supporters of the prime minister, McDonald’s bottle letter has generated fears about whether he can survive. A Conservative MP said: “Even among the Prime Minister’s most uber loyalists, there is now the feeling that he has left and must leave before he inflicts more damage on the party.”
Some MPs predicted that next week’s election for the 1922 back bank Conservative committee executive would result in a “clean sweep” for candidates who want to oust the prime minister by a no-confidence vote. This would require a change to the party rules. “I don’t see there being a‘ loyal slate of Boris, ’” a former cabinet minister said. “Who would be in this?”
Conservative MP Anthony Mangnall, another critic of Johnson, said ministers should disconnect Johnson now. “It is time for cabinet colleagues to acknowledge the appalling damage the prime minister is doing to the party, the government and the country,” he said.
The faces of those ministers sitting around the cabinet table suggested that some were already struggling with this dilemma. At the close of Tuesday, Johnson’s cabinet was disintegrating and with it, perhaps, its control over power.