The Crocodile Tears of Downing Street

WASN'T IT TOUCHING to see the Prime Minister’s adviser, Allegra Stratton, tearfully admitting that she will regret ‘for the rest of my days’ her remarks on the leaked video of a rehearsal for a press conference? Well, no, actually. It wasn’t touching at all. It was one of the most cynical messages to come out of this latest fiasco by the incompetent administration of Boris Johnson.

The world of public relations (PR, or more often referred to in relation to governments as ‘spin’) is often called by journalists ‘the dark side’. After 16 years as a journalist I spent a rather unhappy and frequently frustrating year and a half in a PR company. I may not have enjoyed the experience much, but it did teach me to see through some of the tricks of the trade of the dark side.

In the leaked video of the press conference rehearsal, Ms Stratton comes across as a professional, intelligent, lively, and not unattractive young woman. Shoot forward almost a year to the tearful appearance on the doorstep. She appears as a broken, repentant person, acknowledging a terrible mistake. This clip is loaded with PR.

In order to replace the bubbly, attractive young woman of the original, she will have been instructed not to wear make-up; not to do anything to her hair; to wear the sort of plain clothes that anyone might wear slopping around the house. She is deliberately made to look sloppy – tormented by those ridiculous and hurtful words she said on that video. Aw, poor thing…

But this appalling PR puff takes place almost a year after the original recording. If Ms Stratton were really so gutted by what she said on 22 December 2020, why did the awfulness of her words strike her as being so terrible only on 8 December 2021? Has she really been wrestling with her conscience for the past 12 months?

This whole episode is not, in fact, about whether or not there was a party at 10 Downing Street a year ago (there was) or about the staff at the Prime Minister’s residence acting in a callous manner (and why haven’t the others in the video resigned?). It is about the growing catalogue of lies that emanates from Boris Johnson and his administration.

Johnson was fired from two posts as a journalist for telling lies. He doesn’t acknowledge how many children he has fathered. He and his cronies knowingly hoodwinked a large section of the British public into believing lies about the European Union. His right-hand man not only broke the rules of the first lockdown by driving to the north of England, but brazenly sat in the garden of No.10 and justified his actions. Etcetera.

This is just the latest lie; but the PR, the spin, is becoming ever more threadbare. There will come a point where even Johnson’s most loyally blind supporters will find his blustering approach of, ‘Nothing to see here, move along’, will stop being the fig-leaf that covers the incompetence of Johnson and those with whom he surrounds himself in government.

ENDS