orn Wednesday morning, Judge Heather Hallett, head of the Covid inquiry, was still frustrated by the ongoing disappearance of the government’s WhatsApp messages. Like King Arthur in reverse, government WhatsApp messages have slept quietly in a cave for eons, lost in Albion’s hour of need.
Last week, the Cabinet Office declared that the WhatsApp messages were deemed irrelevant and should be submitted to judicial review. But this week it was decided that they were in fact lost, and therefore still could not be submitted. How careless is the government in this regard. Health minister Lord Bethell lost his phone when he wanted it at a hearing in July 2021. Tories must write all their communications with their hands in permanent marker. And if the WhatsApps are missing, how can anyone in the Cabinet Office look to decide that they are not related? No one at the highest levels of government has thought of this. It’s a classic Billy Bunter defense: “I didn’t eat your WhatsApp messages Jenkins, and yet it’s terrible.”
Installing Boris Johnson, a proven liar trusted by few and unaccustomed to the concept of shame, in No 10 will always backfire in the long run, like releasing a fat bear in your garden to scare the cats dirty with vegetables, and then realize. there is a fat bear in your garden. But I don’t think anyone in the Tory party realizes how quickly the Boris-bear will start to burrow under the garden fence and out into the world of responsible behavior, where your leg is against the tree of truth and crapping the floor of the public life is not acceptable.
Of course, no one should see the WhatsApp messages sent by Johnson. The things Johnson has said in public while in office are absurd enough. “Orientals … have more brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole.” “Working class men … tend to be drunk, criminal, aimless, useless and hopeless.” “If gay marriage was OK back then [why shouldn’t] a union will be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog.” Consider what Johnson said when he thought no one was listening.
Since Johnson’s brain, a squidgy conflation of meat, burps and pus, contains the abstract idea of an infinite number of monkeys and their infinite number of typewriters, it is statistically probable that one of his WhatsApps are just a long list of now angry. slang words for women, gays and foreigners, no slurs on the verbs, like something Lawrence Fox might shout to himself when he’s done masturbating.
It is Wednesday afternoon and my deadline for giving this funny column is approaching, but the deadline for asking questions for receiving WhatsApp messages is in 24 hours. I checked Twitter. As of 58 minutes later, Johnson’s spokesman insisted that Johnson had given all the WhatsApp messages to the Cabinet Office months ago. Perhaps, Johnson is happy to bring Sunak and everyone with him, or he believes, given how bad WhatsApps are for the Tory brand, there is no way they can be brought to the inquiry, except valued from Rishi Sunak hands Judge Heather Hallett himself, as the prime minister repeats various combinations of meaningless sentences, each containing the word “transparency”, until all his fingers break each other using nutcrackers. Try operating a credit card reader now, prime minister!
The problem is, I hit my ridiculous column submission deadline today and the story has changed in such a way that there’s no way to know if it’s going to hold together until you read it over your crushed avocado in woke north London on Sunday morning. I just went and made my son have something to do with potatoes and now Johnson himself is telling Whitehall that they need to “immediately disclose” his WhatsApps in question. On Sunday mornings, you write your own funny column. This is impossible.
The Tories are doing very well trying to get rid of their Johnson-era WhatsApp messages, but to escape the toxic radioactive half-life of his degraded legacy they also need to get rid of Johnson himself. And here’s a funny thing. Two hours or so ago, as I painstakingly researched the above paragraph of Johnson’s bad quotes, I half remembered the dozens of equally dubious ones that Google had already turned up. I looked at Johnson’s famously silly images – the zipwire flags, the staged pub garden rapprochement with Carrie. They are there, but not in anything like so many different manifestations. It was as if, somehow, Johnson was being phased out of the record.
Try it yourself. Do you remember that time Johnson stood in dog poop outside a wheelchair-accessible Uxbridge house, and then stepped on it all over his house, despite his protests? Thought not. No more. Do you remember the time Johnson was caught on the microphone, while waiting for a TODAY startup program interview, telling an unnamed woman a joke about an African man with a speech impediment running after an ice-cream van? No. Do you remember the time when, filmed red-faced and excited at a Brexit referendum night party, he was caught on camera washing his forehead with something he pulled from his pocket that turned out which is a pair of bloody white Y-fronts? Nothing. There is no evidence of this. Systematically, as it struggles to survive by dissociating itself from him, the Tory party erases the record. (The observers The lawyers asked me to point out that this paragraph is a joke.)
I give it now. By Sunday morning this Mexican standoff might be over. Remember when we made fun of Italian politicians? In the good old days.