There are, hard though it often seems to believe this, many people in the country who haven’t caught Boris Johnson in bed with someone. Those people will not, until Wednesday afternoon, have had the chance to watch him squirm as he explains why things aren’t what they look like. It’s not pretty. 

We had squeezed into one of Parliament’s smaller committee rooms. Johnson had brought along at least four lawyers, and a little team of supportive MPs, who cheered as he came in (the MPs, not the lawyers — the nation can’t afford whatever it would have cost to pay the lawyers to cheer). There were piles of paperwork everywhere, bundles containing WhatsApp messages and emails and photos and print-outs of Covid guidance at different points, all pointing to the idea that Downing Street staff had hosted a series of illegal lockdown parties and then, when asked about them, panicked and lied.

Do you know what it’s like being prime minister?

Nothing, Johnson explained, could be further from the truth. He had been let down by those around him. It was dreadfully unfair. He’d been fined for having an illegal birthday party but it was his private secretary who had eaten all the cake. 

Confronted with the photographs of the parties he attended, Johnson explained that they couldn’t be parties, because everyone at them had agreed afterwards that they hadn’t been. “You’re not only accusing me of lying, you’re accusing all those civil servants,” he said, in much the same way he might have said that, if you were accusing him of having an affair, you were also levelling a pretty serious allegation at the two young women in bed with him. The photographs themselves proved his innocence, because who would be reckless enough to make a record of an illegal event?

It was, Johnson said several times, “inconceivable” that he had attended parties and lied about it, although many of us in the room felt that we could without much effort conceive exactly such a thing.

There may be readers who feel that Johnson’s time as prime minister was a national low. I hope it will be a comfort to them to know that no one hated his period in Number 10 as much as he seems to have. Do you know what it’s like being prime minister? People keep asking you things and making you go to places and putting you on TV. Then all anyone wants to talk about afterwards is the dozen or so huge parties that you held and lied about. 

As MPs reminded Johnson of the lockdown rules he imposed on the rest of the country, he became increasingly peevish. It was simply not possible, he said, to put “an electrified force field around every human being”. People in Downing Street had done their best to follow these rules, although, his voice suggested, the rules were completely mad. “We avoided physical contact,” he said. Was that a touch of regret in his voice? “We had signs on the walls!” Tragically for Johnson and his team, no one had thought to make a sign telling them not to have massive piss-ups. If you must blame someone, blame the person who didn’t make that sign.

Harriet Harman, chairing the session, gazed at him, leaning ever further backwards in apparent disbelief. How, she seemed to be wondering, had someone like this ever ended up running the country? Sir Bernard Jenkin queried whether, had someone asked Johnson in November 2020 if a leaving party was permissible, he would have said that it was. Johnson replied that he would have. Eyebrows shot up around the room. This was not how the rest of us remembered lockdown press conferences. 

But it seems we were all victims of the greatest communications failure in modern British history. Somehow, the entire nation was gripped with the idea that we were supposed to stay at home and protect the NHS, to miss funerals, celebrate birthdays on Zoom, stay away from care homes. Even the Queen was captured by this false consciousness, sitting alone as her husband was buried. And in fact we’d all got it wrong. Parties were fine! Had you been working hard? Pile round to someone’s house for a drink! Got rid of a hated colleague? Abba time!

All the evidence of my guilt simply shows how innocent I am

“You were telling the country to do social distancing,” Harman reminded him. “I’m sure that up and down the country there were times when people drifted within one metre of each other,” Johnson said dismissively. We were never supposed to believe all that nonsense he said on the telly. 

Asked whether he’d joked about one gathering being the least socially-distanced event in the land, Johnson doubted it. “I might well have made observations about the importance of social distancing, which was very much on our minds,” he said. Of course — we thought it was a joke, but it was actually a warning. Has anyone ever been the victim of a more unfortunate misunderstandings?

He was becoming angry now. “People who say we were partying in lockdown simply do not know what they were talking about,” he snarled. Staff had taken strenuous efforts to avoid contact. “We didn’t touch each other’s pens,” Johnson said earnestly. “Presumably people were passing drinks to each other?” Harman asked. “Of course,” Johnson replied. 

His fans had had enough. Sir James Duddridge, knighted last year for services to Borises, began heckling the committee. “Complete nonsense!” he said. “Rambling!” One Tory MP asked if Johnson would characterise the committee as a “kangaroo court”. Well, he replied, that would depend on what it decided. Behind him his lawyer, Lord Pannick, raised his eyebrows and shook his head. There comes a point when your client is on his own.

Johnson may have sensed he had lost the room, so he asked us to judge him not on what he did, but on what he now says he believed he was doing. “You’ve got to understand,” he pleaded, “that in my mind these did not seem to be improper events.” In my mind, darling, I wasn’t cheating on you. This isn’t what it looks like. Those parties meant nothing to me. It would have been insane of me to sleep with your sister when you had only nipped to the shops. I would have to have been mad to use my own credit card to pay the hotel bill. All the evidence of my guilt simply shows how innocent I am.