Bozo’s Lame Excuse Unravels

George Wigg is a name now long forgotten: he was an MP and later peer, and more importantly a confidant and fixer for Harold Wilson. He became briefly notorious in the mid-1970s. Driving round Soho late one night, Wigg stopped his car; he got out and approached a young woman. Sadly for him, she turned out to be an undercover Police officer and Wigg was duly nicked. It was his excuse that was most memorable.

He mistakenly thought that she was a newspaper seller. In 70s Soho. Late at night. Some of his pals even backed him up. Private Eye magazine was having none of it, and put Wigg on their next front page, showing him getting out of a taxi late at night with the word balloon saying “Hang on cabbie - I’m desperate for a newspaper”.

The Wigg moment was replicated in its lameness yesterday by alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as he finally decided to summon some form of apology for the Downing Street parties that he had been assured were not really happening, but that he had just happened to attend, while the rest of the country was in lockdown.

Private Eye issue 391: a lame excuse to rival Bozo

At a time when individuals could meet only one other person outside their household, and when the cops were breaking up gatherings, no matter how small, in back gardens, Bozo and his staff had a cheese and wine gathering in the Downing Street garden. He excused that one by claiming “those people were at work talking about work”.

Only five days later, though, as the BBC has reported, “About 100 people were invited by email to ‘socially distanced drinks in the No 10 garden’ on behalf of the prime minister’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds. Witnesses told the BBC the PM and his wife were among about 30 people who attended”. It was a bring your own bottle bash.

So what say Bozo about that one? “Boris Johnson has confirmed he attended the event, saying he was there for 25 minutes and ‘believed implicitly that this was a work event’”. HE WAS THERE. But he was sorry. Sort of. Sorry for how bad it looked. It got worse.

“With hindsight I should have sent everyone back inside. I should have found some other way to thank them, and I should have recognised that - even if it could have been said technically to fall within the guidance - there would be millions and millions of people who simply would not see it that way”. Work event, eh? But here a problem entered.

If it was a work event, what was the then Carrie Symonds doing there? Drinking something containing gin? Then another problem entered: Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross declined to back Bozo, not least because the PM was unable to reassure Ross that there would not be any more of those inconvenient revelations to come.

On top of that, yet another problem has since entered: much of the excuse making has centred around the gathering being nothing more than staff from offices within Downing Street spilling out into a secure garden. But now it is claimed that Henry Newman and Josh Grimstone, neither of whom works in Downing Street, were there. They are known as FOCs (Friends of Carrie). And so the excuse continues to unravel.

But good of the cabinet to back Bozo and keep him in post while the Tories’ poll ratings, already grim, go down the pan. Bozo is finished; being in denial only makes it worse.

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