Boris Johnson scuttles away from his flagrant crimes, like a whingeing guilty schoolboy | Andrew Rawnsley
Several books, many profiles and countless commentaries have been written about the life and crimes of Boris Johnson during the lurid passage of that toxic meteor through our political firmament. You have my sympathies if you don't have much remaining appetite for delving into the inky depths of his dissolute character, but one thing has not been said quite enough. The man is a coward. Whenever faced with the consequences of his actions, he ducks. Whenever confronted with a choice that requires some courage, he swerves. Whenever asked to make good on a promise, he betrays. Whenever the choice is fight or flight, he flees.
This is one of the many respects in which he is so starkly different to Winston Churchill, the wartime leader he preposterously invited people to think of as his inspiration and role model for leadership. After the disaster of the Dardanelles campaign during the First World War, Churchill resigned from the cabinet and sought redemption and rehabilitation by crossing the Channel to serve on the western front. Found guilty of lying to parliament about the squalid scandal of Partygate, Mr Johnson can do no better than act the guilty schoolboy trying to hide from a deserved punishment. He is quitting as an MP because scarpering from the Commons was the last desperate resort left to him to avoid answering for what he did. He is scuttling from the scene of one of his most flagrant and egregious crimes against public life rather than face the music for trying to cover up a scandal by lying about it to parliament and to avoid the entirely appropriate sanction recommended by the seven MPs on the privileges committee.
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