Boris Johnson has travelled further than the circumference of the Earth to evade difficult questions over the last decade, Labour has said.
The opposition looked into the prime minister’s notorious absences from important moments since 2011 – and found out he has travelled an astonishing 26,529 miles to serve awkward encounters.
The world’s circumference is approximately 24,901 miles.
Johnson was controversially absent from a heated sleaze debate this week, where MPs discussed the Tories’ attempt to overhaul the independent MPs’ watchdog in light of the Owen Paterson scandal.
Round-up
A Downing Street spokesperson claimed Johnson would not be able to attend the debate because was visiting a hospital in Northumberland and his train would not return to London in time.
But journalists were quick to point out that the prime minister took a private jet only last week in order to make it in time for a dinner with former Daily Telegraph writers.
And while the hospital visit was a roundtrip of just 568 miles, Johnson travelled more than 2,000 miles for a holiday in Marbella when the UK was in the midst of fuel shortages and a supply chain crisis.
Amid the 2020 A-level chaos, he took a return trip to Aberdeen for 1,098 miles and during the US-Iran crisis in early 2020, he went to St Vincent and Grenadines on holiday – 8,550-mile return trip.
During a vote for Heathrow’s third runway, Johnson, who was foreign secretary at the time, went to Kabul – a 7,102 mile trip.
Things were not any different when he was a mayor either – during the 2011 London riots, he went to Canada, travelling 7,108 miles to Toronto and back.
Avoiding scrutiny before last election
Johnson infamously got up early to pretend to be a milkman at Greenside Farm Business Park rather than face the hard-edged political questioning of Good Morning Britain in the run-up to the 2019 election.
Minders pushed reporters back as the prime minister could be spotted hiding behind stacks of milk crates and disappearing into the large fridge at the dairy depot.
And he was the only party leader to dodge an interview with Andrew Neil in the lead up to the 2019 election.
The broadcaster sent out a final appeal to the prime minister, saying the BBC has “been asking him for weeks now to give us a date, a time, a venue”.
Last week, Green MP Caroline Lucas slammed Johnson for caring “nothing” about Parliamentary standards, decency and the rule of law.
Lucas admitted she ran out of ideas on how Johnson can be held to account, saying Johnson is “the judge, the jury and the court”.
She also indicated Tory MPs were “dragooned” into supporting an amendment which would have prevented the immediate suspension of former Tory MP Paterson following an investigation into his conduct.
Paterson was found to have repeatedly lobbied ministers and officials for two companies paying him more than £100,000 per year, but the government U-turned in its plan to protect him after facing public backlash.
Related: Starmer: Johnson starts Brexit brawls to distract from Tory scandals
