I’m looking forward to Boris Johnson’s appearance before the committee of privileges on Wednesday, but I’m puzzled by his likely defence. John Rentoul reminds us that Johnson will probably repeat: “There is no evidence that I was at any stage advised by anyone, whether a civil servant or a political adviser, that an event would be against the rules or the guidance before it went ahead.”
We, the public, understood the guidance and the rules and, if we’d forgotten or weren’t sure, we googled them. We don’t have civil servants or political advisers to tell us how to stay within the law. Yet we managed.
What makes him, the one who actually set these rules, so truly dim that he didn’t know how to follow them? Or perhaps instead, so truly arrogant that he thinks he couldn’t have known unless he had been so advised?
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