'But when the Prime Minister does it then it is not illegal': How Boris Johnson succeeded in convincing nobody with his “flimsy” assurances

One of the things that always troubled me about the testimony of Boris Johnson to the Committee of Privileges was its billing by certain portions of the media as some kind of box office event, or a show trial. 

In the UK, court hearings are not widely broadcast. Actually, under s.41 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925 and the Contempt of Court Act 1981, filming and recording in the Crown Court had been banned until July 2022 when a judge's sentencing remarks were broadcast for the first time in England and Wales. 

It’s one of the few exports from the US that hasn’t fully assimilated its way into our legal system - and probably rightly so. 

As society becomes weaned on this hellish Netflix version of hyper-reality that we live in, where criminal cases are reduced to petitions on social media that likely only appreciate about 5% of the complexities (and sometimes come accompanied with jaunty memes featuring tigers), it’s probably for the best if the future of justice in the UK doesn’t rely on the infatuations of the country’s ‘chronically bored’ who are made to feel sorry for every Peter Sutcliffe that our great nation produces. 

And then there’s Boris Johnson.