Decision time: did habitual liar Boris Johnson tell some lies? It’s going to be tense | Marina Hyde

The former PM is wheeling out the old clown act to rebuff the Partygate allegations. Let's hope it's for the last time

One last heave - in all senses of the word - for Boris Johnson, Britain's worst ex, who tomorrow flops himself out in front of the standards committee and asks it to consider an auto-satirical question: did the foremost British liar of the age tell a lie? If you want a sense of our self-respect as a nation, an entire parliamentary investigation has spent 10 months gathering evidence on that question, while 220,000 and rising has been spent by the taxpayer on Johnson's legal defence. It is, let's face it, a long way to go to reach the conclusion, Lol of course he told a lie - it's BORIS JOHNSON?!?!?!?!?"

Strip away the incidental details of this latest adventure in a career of turbo-fibbing and you are faced with a reality as old as bullshit itself. Johnson, who last told the truth during the Reagan administration - and then only accidentally - has somehow got the government to fund state-of-the-art lawyers to prove he wasn't aware of parties happening in his own house, attended by his own self, against his own rules, and in at least one case against his own laws, having gone on telly every single night to tell people that compliance to the letter of said rules and laws was a matter of life and death. Please bear this in mind if you tune in to his appearance tomorrow afternoon, along with the question: does our country have a path to dignity? Because this ain't it.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist