Why it’s the Pen Farthing scandal that should’ve brought down Boris Johnson

Sue Gray has given a damning update and Boris Johnson, less one MP and the confidence of an as yet uncertain number of others, has so far survived as Prime Minister. Partygate – having already squatted, immovably, at the front of the news agenda for months – is likely to be a suppurating wound for Johnson. When he does go (and it very much is a when; nobody, now, is predicting a golden decade of Boris Johnson, so he will have to eat the prime ministerial Weetabix he is given, and no more), it will be these events that critically weakened him. 

One can see why, of course. The mental image of the unceasing Gatsbyesque bacchanal that was apparently 10 Downing Street throughout the pandemic is hard to shake. It strikes a note of deep pain and revulsion for everyone who counted the lockdowns as among the most singularly difficult periods in our lives.

So all consuming has partygate been, however, that it has largely obscured the story that, in a just world, would see the Prime Minister resigning in the kind of all consuming disgrace that would ensure he was shunned in the street until his dying day. I am talking about the story of Pen Farthing, the former British soldier and founder of the Afghanistan-based animal charity Nowzad. 

Amid the chaos of the fall of Kabul, Farthing began raising the funds to charter a plane to evacuate his staff and the charity’s animals to the UK. The campaign garnered significant traction, and ultimately Farthing left Afghanistan with his animals but without his staff, who he had insisted he would not leave without. 

Pen Farthing, whose name is actually Paul, is not the bad guy in this story. If you were to approach his version of events with a degree of credulity (a degree of credulity that would lead me to describe you as credulous), it is possible to squint into existence a good faith reading of Farthing’s actions. There is a bad guy, however: an individual who had the power to intervene, but whose actions can only be interpreted as self-serving and venal; whose actions, so motivated, had appalling and very possibly fatal consequences. The very worst person in this story is Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In December 2021, Foreign Office whistleblower Raphael Marshall told the foreign affairs select committee that “there was a direct trade-off between transporting Nowzad’s animals and evacuating British nationals and Afghans evacuees, including Afghans who had served with British soldiers”, and that this trade-off was made on the direct orders of the Prime Minister, something that Downing Street denied. Last week, emails released by the committee revealed that the Nowzad evacuation was described by officials as having received authorisation from the Prime Minister personally. It is very reasonable to assume that this cost human lives; it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that Johnson, probably seeking to avoid Farthing’s threatened bad press, simply did not care.

As it initially unfolded in August, Labour made little comment on the Pen Farthing affair. Amid the chaos that surrounded the withdrawal from Afghanistan, this was understandable. We now have more of the facts of the case, however, and the opposition’s response remains muted. Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey tweeted: “Once again, the PM has been caught out lying. He should never have given priority to flying animals out of Afghanistan while Afghans who worked for our forces were left behind. We need to know why the PM overruled the Defence Secretary with this decision.” 

I agree with this tweet, of course, but the implication of that preface (“once again”) is that these less reported events are acting as support for the broader allegations around the Prime Minister’s relationship with the truth that partygate has raised. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy also concentrated on this aspect of the news, citing it as an example of Johnson’s “corrosive and chronic dishonesty”. 

Lying is often regarded as a cardinal political sin (so cardinal that there are strict rules around levelling accusations of lying in the chamber). In this case, it seems wrong to me that we should concentrate on the lie, rather than on the blistering moral abhorrence of the act itself.

If you always thought Boris Johnson was a venal shit, the partygate stories lack a certain edge. He does not care about other people; that he might be entirely ambivalent to the suffering of families unable to see their dying loved ones comes as no surprise. Such ambivalence is not morally neutral, but even for the jaded there is something shocking about the outright trading for human life on show in the recently released emails. There are, tragically, an abundance of stories from Afghanistan that show the real cost of this decision; just one comes in the disclosure by journalist Patrick Strudwick that he had passed the names of  LGBT+ Afghans to the government to be told there was nothing they could do to help. These were the choices our Prime Minister made.

On show in the Pen Farthing story is the very worst of how this country is run. How Farthing got the number of Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s special adviser, allowing the charity founder to leave a voicemail threatening to “destroy” the aide, is unclear. A well-connected man appears to have traded on the British public’s profoundly strange relationship with animals and on the government’s fear of bad publicity, and Downing Street rolled over and gave him the resources he asked for. As a result, these vanishingly finite resources were used to fly out a plane full of dogs and cats while people suffered the consequences. This is who Boris Johnson is – and it is the responsibility of the opposition to make him own it.