Irish Examiner view: Boris's government is like a comic opera

Boris Johnson.

It is fortuitous for British prime minister Boris Johnson that there are no natural successors in England to WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. 

Because his government, and it is close to embarrassing to say this about our nearest neighbours, is more of a comic opera than the creators of HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance could ever have imagined.

The latest intervention by the Metropolitan Police, which has had a wretched year mishandling other cases and serious incidents, involves a request to the cabinet mandarin Sue Gray to remove references in her report to eight incidents of lockdown-breaking parties that the force is investigating. This is, it is said, to avoid “prejudicing their inquiries”.

This means that the long-promised Gray Report, the expectation of which has been the tissue paper behind which Johnson loyalists and reluctant ministers have been hiding, has now been further delayed or may be published imminently in a heavily redacted form. Or the Met may ultimately decide, after a propitious delay, that there is not sufficient evidence to prosecute.

Given that this is a fixed penalty offence it is unlikely that the reason for delay is anything other than a piece of political performance art. British voters don’t need Sue Gray, or commissioner Cressida Dick, to tell them whether or not the rules have broken. 

The public are clear that they were. What they are waiting for is some act of retribution. Some proper contrition. What they expect is a cover-up. A former supreme court justice said “the police have no legal right to demand that Gray delay publication of her report and it is constitutionally undesirable that they have done so”.

If there is a Gilbertian refrain which most accurately sums up the (overwhelmingly) male sense of entitlement and privilege which runs through Johnson’s benighted administration it is the ‘Entrance and March of the Peers’ from Iolanthe, another sort of implausible fairy story “Loudly let the trumpet bray.

“Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!

“Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow, ye masses,

“Blow the trumpets, bang the brasses,

“Tantantara, Tzing boom!”