Mislead, omit, obfuscate, bluster, deny, deflect, attack, apologize while implying that he has done nothing wrong — Boris Johnson's blueprint for dealing with a crisis, his critics say, almost never begins, and rarely ends, with simply telling the truth. "People have known that Boris Johnson lies for 30 years," the writer and academic Rory Stewart, a former Conservative member of Parliament, said recently. "He's probably the best liar we've ever had as a prime minister. He knows a hundred different ways to lie." The soon-to-be-ex prime minister has a long and well-documented history both of evading the truth and of acting as if he believes himself to be exempt from the normal rules of behavior. For years, his government weathered scandal after scandal: He was rebuked by the government's own ethics adviser after a wealthy Conservative donor contributed tens of thousands of pounds to help him refurbish his apartment. (Mr. Johnson repaid the money.) There were the private text messages he exchanged with a wealthy British businessman over his plan to manufacture ventilators in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, which raised questions of impropriety. There was an almost farcical accrual of embarrassing disclosures about how often Mr. Johnson's aides (and sometimes Mr. Johnson) attended boozy parties during the worst days of the Covid lockdown, flagrantly violating rules the country had set for itself. In the end, the prime minister's different explanations for what he knew, and when, about Chris Pincher, a Conservative legislator accused of sexual impropriety, finally tipped the scales against him. It was clear that he had once again failed to tell the truth. His many years in public life — as a newspaper reporter and columnist, as the editor of an influential London political magazine, as a politician — have left a trail of witnesses to, and victims of, his slippery nature. "I would not take Boris's word about whether it is Monday or Tuesday," Max Hastings, the Telegraph editor who hired Mr. Johnson as his Brussels correspondent, once said. In 2019, when Mr. Johnson was poised to become prime minister, Mr. Hastings wrote an article entitled "I Was Boris Johnson's Boss: He is Utterly Unfit to be Prime Minister." In it, he called Mr. Johnson a "cavorting charlatan" who suffered from "moral bankruptcy" and exhibited "a contempt for the truth." Mr. Hastings, who employed Mr. Johnson when the future prime minister was in his 20s, was not the first to raise questions about his seriousness of purpose and inflated sense of self. When Mr. Johnson was 17 and a student at Eton College, the all-boys boarding school that caters to the country's elites, his classics teacher sent a letter home to Mr. Johnson's father, Stanley. "Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies," the teacher, Martin Hammond, wrote. He continued, "Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticized for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility." He added, speaking of the teenager who would grow up to be a prime minister: "I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else." |
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