Lies, damned lies and the Elizabeth Line

This week: what does Boris Johnson actually think he is playing at? Also: the unnerving southern-ness of Canada; and I have some thoughts about Crossrail.

So: the line is that Boris Johnson did mislead MPs but that he did not so intentionally or recklessly. When he said he had believed the parties taking place in Downing Street in the middle of lockdown had been within the rules, it was because he genuinely believed that there was nothing to prevent people who were working together anyway from sticking around for an extra few hours and getting on the room temperature white. By the appearance of the karaoke machine, the suitcases full of booze and other useful clues that what we had on our hands here was what is technically termed “a party”, the Prime Minister, a famously shy and retiring man, had gone to bed. In unrelated news, the dog ate my homework, the cheque’s in the post, and she’s actually just left so I’m sure she’ll be with you any moment now.

Nadine Batchelor-Hunt @nadinebh_

Simon Case's written evidence is going to be a bit of a tricky one for Johnson later...

The interesting question to my mind is: why does Johnson think this will work? His defence provided no new documentary evidence, and the decision to hand it in as late as possible and then bitch that it’s not been published yet looks suspiciously like an attempt to cover for the fact; if it all goes wrong he could be suspended from the Commons or even, though this is surely far less likely for reasons of electoral interest alone, expelled. (Rishi Sunak has told his MPs they’ll get a free vote as to any sanctions Johnson faces. I suspect he rather enjoyed that.) The consequences for a man who barely exists outside his political persona could be enormous. How can he possibly think that everything’s going to be fine?

One possible answer is – he doesn’t. He just doesn’t have anything better. Short of fessing up, which he is never going to do, he doesn’t really have an option more sophisticated than “brazenly claiming that the sky is green and that anyone who can’t see it is mad”. 

Then there’s the fact that he has, almost, always got away with everything before. There is still no shortage of client journalists and flatterers on the backbenches to reflect back what Boris Johnson wishes to see of himself: perhaps, like the party he once led, this is deluding him about the consensus view outside his small circle.

Or perhaps, he genuinely believes it because he genuinely didn’t understand his own rules. I’m not buying this one – I don’t actually think Boris Johnson is stupid; I think it far more likely he thinks the rest of us are, and thus can bluster his way through – but I suppose it is at least, in a narrow technical sense, possible. 

But the most likely explanation, I think, is: 

He believes he didn’t lie, in the fact of documented evidence that he did. After an entire career spent lying through his teeth, as strategy as much as defence mechanism, he can genuinely no longer see the line between actually existing reality and the one he constructs in his head. It is entirely plausible to me that, some time last year, Boris Johnson lied, knowingly, to get himself through a tricky day in the Commons, and now genuinely believes he did no such thing.

After month after month of writing about Daniel Hannan, watching his faith in Brexit unshaken even as he deleted tweet after tweet to deny he’d ever said things that swiftly had proved to be wrong, I realised that it was a category error to imagine his ideology as a set of rational choices. Rather, it was like faith: something could be wrong, and yet right in some greater sense because it served the cause. Perhaps Boris Johnson is the same. He may have known as he said it that he was lying to parliament: yet in his mind, somehow that has magically transformed into acting in good faith, because it served the cause of him.

We probably all have small, comforting delusions – that we don’t actually look like we did in that photo; that this year our team might win the cup – that enable us to go on functioning. It’s just that most of us don’t get to use them as the basis for governing the country.

Map of the week

This week, the main bit of the newsletter is about Crossrail, and – I’m not going to lie to you about this – it does go on a bit. So: that’s going last. Map first.

And this week, we’re illustrating one of my favourite mind blowing facts in all of human geography: that most Canadians live a lot, lot farther south than you think.