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Things You Can Say About Boris Johnson That You Shouldn’t be Able to Say About a Prime Minister
When you train to be a journalist you have to rapidly learn a lot of law. You need to be able to cover everything from a magistrate’s court to the Supreme Court to parliamentary proceedings without getting sued — or convicted of contempt of court and thrown in jail.
I did my training just over a decade ago and back then, in the pre-Trump days, there was an expectation that politicians would at least pretend to have integrity. Back in those simpler times, when the law was the law and facts were valued, a young reporter calling a ‘top politician’ a liar — let alone a racist, an inciter of social conflict or a deceiver of both partners and voters — would have been in trouble.
Such is the rapid decline in the quality of ‘top politicians’, on both sides of the Atlantic, that it is possible to call prime minister Boris Johnson (and indeed president Donald Trump) any of those things and have no chance of being on the losing side of a libel case. This is because to be successfully sued for defamation, the statement the journalist makes must be untrue.
I will outline examples which would allow a decent politician to sue for libel, yet would not offer that option to Boris Johnson. This is because each can be shown to be true.
