Another lie from Johnson
On 24 November 2021, at Prime Minister’s questions, the then Prime Minister said that“now, almost a month after furlough ended, there are more people in work than there were before the pandemic began.”—[Official Report, 24 November 2021; Vol. 704, c. 344.]
That statement was untrue. The monthly employment statistics at that time showed that there were over half a million fewer people in employment than there were before the pandemic began, and total employment remained lower than before the pandemic until this month’s employment statistics.
The former Prime Minister made the same untrue claim on 15 December 2021, then again on 5 January 2022 —when he said it three times—and then on 12 January and 19 January 2022.
On 1 February 2022, the director general for regulation at the Office for Statistics Regulation wrote to the director of data science at 10 Downing Street to point out that that repeated claim was untrue.
The Prime Minister repeated the claim again on 2 February, and again on 23 February 2022.
I thought at first that the Prime Minister might have just misunderstood the numbers. It was true, as he claimed on a number of occasions, that the number of people on payrolls was higher than before the pandemic, but that was because a lot of self-employed people gave up self-employment during the pandemic or afterwards and became employees on payrolls instead.
The letter from the director general having had no impact, the then chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir David Norgrove, wrote to the Prime Minister on 24 February 2022
“Dear Prime Minister…it is wrong to claim that there are now more people in work than before the pandemic began: the increase in the number of people who are on payrolls is more than offset by the reduction in the number of people who are self-employed.”
At the Liaison Committee in March 2022, I asked the then Prime Minister whether he accepted that correction in Sir David Norgrove’s letter.
His reply was not straightforward, but the transcript of the meeting shows that Mr Johnson understood fully and clearly what had happened in the labour market—he did not misunderstand the figures—and he also accepted that employment was in fact lower than before the pandemic. He said that he was going to correct the record on that point, which he did not do, but he did recognise that his claim had been mistaken.
Despite that, Mr Johnson subsequently carried on making the claim. He said it again the next month, on 20 April and on 27 April.
In his final Question Time as Prime Minister on 20 July last year, he said, despite knowing well that it was untrue,
“We have more people in paid employment than at any time in the history of this country.”—[Official Report, 20 July 2022; Vol. 718, c. 951.]
My conclusion from all of this, which I think sheds some light on the events covered by the report, is that Mr Johnson just is not interested in whether a statement is true or not. He is a clever man—he thinks quite hard about what he plans to say—but the criterion, “Is this true?” is not an important consideration for him.
I remember those stats - and every time he said it, I wanted the Speaker to tell him not to lie.