The prime minister’s denials are both a thoughtless exaggeration and a wholly inadequate response to recent scandals
Boris Johnson headed back to the Cop26 conference this week, doubtless hoping that his trip might divert attention from the sleaze allegations washing around his party and government at Westminster. If so, he hoped in vain. Instead, with the world’s press watching, the prime minister could not escape making a statement about the domestic crisis. In words that may eventually be replayed as often as Richard Nixon’s denial that he was a crook or Tony Blair’s claim to be pretty straight, Mr Johnson said: “I genuinely believe that the UK is not remotely a corrupt country.”
You do not have to define corruption by the most extreme standards to recognise that this is both a thoughtless exaggeration and wholly inadequate. Britain stands in a “could do better” place, ranked 11th cleanest out of 180 in Transparency International’s global corruption ratings. Yet as an anti-corruption adviser to the government of Nigeria (ranked 149th) pointed out on Thursday, the UK is also a “tangential enabler” and London “the most notorious safe haven for looted funds in the world today”. British politicians and public officials may not get into office by making and taking massive bribes. They may not spend their careers salting away millions in Swiss bank accounts. But these are not the only ways of defining corruption. Polling shows that the public understands this better than the prime minister does.