Correct the record, prime minister: it is in your own interest

Boris Johnson’s reputation for being careless with facts undermines democracy, but it undermines him too, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson might have a chance of being prime minister for longer if he could raise his reputation from totally unreliable to slightly slippery (Getty)

Boris Johnson was like a child hauled to the headteacher’s office to establish the facts about another child’s missing phone. “I think I gave it back to her,” he might have said. He told Stephen Timms, the Labour chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, “I think I took steps to correct the record earlier,” when asked about his incorrect claim that more people are in work than before the pandemic.

He has not corrected the record. What he has done, as he explained to headteacher Timms, is reword that claim so that it is accurate: there are more employees on payrolls than before the pandemic. From the prime minister’s point of view, stopping making an untrue claim and being careful with language once the untrue claim has been pointed out amounts to “correcting the record”, but that is not what most people mean by the phrase.

“What does it matter?” Johnson will be asking himself and his advisers. “No one will now be misled by my previous statements. The opposition and the media have made such a fuss about it that the true facts have had more attention than the initial claims, and anyway, it doesn’t matter because the total number of people in work, employees and self-employed, will soon be higher than it was before the pandemic. Never wrong for long.”