Guilty party: Boris Johnson’s lies catch up with him

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The people of Japan have made good use of their plentiful hot springs for centuries, building the culture of onsen, or hot baths. But all that heat could also be used for geothermal energy. We examine how a clash between those two industries is being resolved. And lots of people can't bear the prick of a needle. A medical technology that definitely hasn't moved with the times. Now researchers are borrowing ideas from insects with hopes to make injections more painless and more effective. But first, What might seem outside Britain to be pretty small bore misbehavior might turn out to put an end to the career of its former prime minister, Boris Johnson. Just as COVID 19 first gripped the country, Mr. Johnson gravely addressed the nation.

From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction. You must stay at home. If you don't follow the rules, the police will have the powers to enforce them.

Simple though the instruction was, it seems members of his government and party weren't following it. For months, details leaked out of parties held in the Prime Minister's residence and government buildings. People in close quarters holding champagne at birthday parties and after work drinks. The British people were furious. Many still are.

I don't trust him. I don't think many people do.

I think he's proven himself to be a liar. I don't think people are ready to forgive him because of what happened during the pandemic.

Mr. Johnson just kept insisting, including in Parliament, that he didn't know the gatherings were happening.

What I could tell the Right Honourable Gentleman is that all guidance was followed completely during number 10, or that where.

They did, no rules had been broken.

I can tell you that the guidelines were followed at all times or that.

If rules were broken, he didn't know.

About that part, I can understand how infuriating it must be to think that the people who have been setting the rules have not been following the rules, Mr. Speaker, because I was also furious to see that clip.

The whole mess sparked a nickname, inevitably. Partygate. And a committee investigation that's rumbled on for more than a year focused not on the parties, but the purported lies. When Mr. Johnson saw a draft of the committee's report last week, he stepped down as a Member of Parliament and former allies began to distance themselves from him.

I liked working with him as Prime Minister, but as I said right at the beginning of this, the world has moved on.

Today the public got to see what Mr. Johnson had seen and it's not pretty.

So this report says that there were lots of parties in and around Downing street during lockdown.

Duncan Robinson writes Badget, the economist's column.

On British politics, that Mr. Johnson knew they were going on, that he lied to Parliament when he said that he didn't really know the extent of them, etc. And then he lied to the committee about them and then he attacked the committee and said that they were karen kangaroo court. And then he tried to intimidate it. And so it's all rather damning for the former Prime Minister.

And so specifically, what did the report conclude?

So the report concluded that Mr. Johnson had committed multiple contempts of Parliament. They said he had deliberately misled the House. They said he had deliberately misled the committee itself. They said that he had breached the confidence of the committee by publishing a response to a draft, a report that they sent him out of sort of courtesy. And then he tried to undermine the committee and thereby undermining the democratic process of the House. And so it's all rather grim. And then because of that, they recommended he receive a 90 day suspension which would be unprecedented for a former Prime Minister to be punished in this way. And then as an added kicker, they even took away his sort of former members pass which allows former MPs to come and go as they please in Parliament, that sort of privilege that Johnson will enjoy.

And how has Mr. Johnson responded to all this so far?

He has responded very, very badly. So he's already resigned his seat basically because he knew he was likely to be suspended and that he knew he would likely face a by election and he knew he would likely lose that. So instead he quit and issued a very, very grumpy statement calling the committee a kangaroo court full of political enemies, effectively. And this morning after the report came out, he said this is rubbish. It is A lie. In order to reach this deranged conclusion, the committee is obliged to say a series of things that are pat. Absurd. So he's not taking it very well and neither are some of his allies. So we've already had a few MPs who are very close to him who've quit and stood down because they don't like the way he's being treated. And there's basically a war of words between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, the current Prime Minister, with each sort of pointing the finger at each other.

And what's the nature of the war of words, then?

So normally, Prime Ministers are allowed to appoint people to the House of Lords when they resigned and hand out knighthoods and stuff like that. And Boris Johnson wanted to reward a few of his loyal MPs by putting them into the House of Lords. Now, this is a relatively absurd system, but Britain is an at times absurd country. So it's just something that has just gone on for a while. So Mr. Johnson's not an exception here. What did happen that was rather peculiar this time was that he tried to make some sitting MPs and put them into the House of Lords, which is a sort of constitutional. No, no. And they only found out that they weren't able to be put into the Lords rather last minute, and they are rather upset about it and so they've quit in a huff. Boris Johnson basically thinks that Rishi Sunak has stitched up his friends, that Rishi Sunak could have made it easy, these MPs to go into the House of Lords, but he declined to do so. And when Rishi Sunak was asked about this, Rishi Sunak basically said, yes, Rishi Sunak could have appointed these people to the House of Lords as effectively as a favour to Boris Johnson. But he said, quote, boris Johnson asked me to do something I wasn't prepared to do. And so he hasn't. And so Rishi Sunya's come out of this relatively well.

And so all of this really is pretty messy for the Conservative Party as a whole. Right MPs standing down, a spat with the current PM. What do you make of all of this?

But there's a lot of chaos around the party. It's never good to have MPs resigning. It's never good to have a former Prime Minister accused of lying to the House and deliberately misleading a committee and then facing a punishment of a 90 day suspension. And so that just creates a sort of rather ugly backdrop. It creates a sense of a party that can't really run the country if it can't even deal with its own internal affairs effectively. And then you've got the added political problem that Rishi Sunak now faces, three by elections across the country. So they have Mr. Johnson's old seat, which is in the outskirts of London, and the Conservatives are really rather likely to lose that. But then the two Johnson allies who resigned their seats are in much safer Conservative parts of the country. But it's not looking guaranteed that the Conservatives will hold those seats either. So within a few months, we could end up with a situation where the Conservatives have a very angry, wounded Prime Minister attacking them from outside the party. And they've just lost three by elections. And when you have lots of actual problems, such as the cost of living crisis and inflation go through the roof and people's mortgages going up, this is an extra problem that you really don't want. So losing three seats won't cause the Conservative government to collapse, but it's just another political problem that they have to fix. It makes the Prime Minister look weaker, it confirms that they're not especially unpopular and it just creates a bad vibe within the party.

And what about for Mr. Johnson himself? You say he'll now be sort of railing outside the party machinery, but he's also risen from the ashes more than once before. What do you reckon to his future?

Yes, Boris Johnson is very good at bouncing back, but this one seems rather fatal. So he's come back from sort of smaller scandals in his career, but he's already effectively peaked. He was Prime Minister and then he was kicked out by his own party because they didn't think he was very good at the job. And now he has the added sort of insult of being found to have lied to Parliament. So he's not going to go quietly, he's going to make a lot of noise from outside the party. And then if the Tories do lose in 2024, he will hawk himself as a replacement. He will say he won an election, he never lost one, and that he is still a viable alternative. But when you look at polling and when you ask people about him, he's not very popular within the country. There is this sort of myth around his popularity. Everyone thinks that everyone else likes him, even if they don't. But that could be something that does sort of cajole the Conservative Party into welcoming back. But even then that seems very unlikely. So this could just be the moment that Britain moves into a sort of post Boris Johnson world.

Thanks very much for your time, Duncan.

Thanks for having Me.

I went to Okuhida Onsengo in Gifu, northern Japan. Okuhida on Sengo is a popular tourist destination in Japan. It's known for its hot springs.

Moeka Iida writes about Japan for the Economist.

I was actually there not for the hot springs, but to visit the Nakao geothermal power plant, which started operations at the end of last year. The plant uses steam from underground to generate power. I went inside one of the buildings where they had a turbine moving or spinning using the steam coming from underground. And it was spinning at a very high speed, and it was incredibly loud. At a maximum capacity, Nakaud can supply electricity to about 4,000 households. In theory, Nakao's success could be replicated all across Japan, which has 100 active volcanoes.

So it sounds as if it's a pretty big potential source of pretty clean energy.

Yes. So geothermal is a renewable power source that uses heat inside the earth. And unlike solar or wind, which really depends on the weather, geothermal is known for being a baseload power, so it can generate power around the clock. Japan is estimated to have a geothermal potential of 23 gigawatts, which is big enough to replace 23 nuclear reactors. And Japan has the third biggest geothermal potential in the world, following America and Indonesia. But when it comes to actual power generation, it ranks 10th. So there's a big missed opportunity there.

And why is that?

Japan has hardly tapped into its geothermal reserves. Geothermal only accounts for 0.3% of its electricity supply. And what's holding back Japan's geothermal potential is its big hot spring industry, or onsen, as it's called in Japanese. A lot of these hot spring owners believe that developing geothermal power plants could negatively affect bathing pools or potentially deplete the water. And if you talk to geologists, they would often refute this claim. They think it's very unlikely. But in order to develop geothermal power plants, you need to ask for consent. But usually the local hot spring owners withhold that consent. And hot spring culture is deeply rooted in Japan. The industry attracts around 130 million visitors a year. So the hot spring industry is a big lobby. It has a lot of influence over policies.

So is this conflict with the hot springs, with the onsen industry, the only thing that's standing in the way of Japan's geothermal energy revolution?

Well, there are other obstacles to geothermal development in Japan. So 80% of Japan's geothermal reserves are located inside national parks, where development is restricted. So there's regulations aimed at protecting the Scenery and biodiversity in these parks. And also, a lot of Japan's land is covered by mountains, which makes it harder and costly to bring equipment. And Japan's underground geology is also relatively complex. There's a lot of layers of hard rock that are difficult to drill through.

So that latter bit sounds pretty hard to overcome. What is the government doing to get over these hurdles?

Well, the Japanese government isn't giving up. It's committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. And it sees renewables, including geothermal, a core element of this goal. And despite all the barriers, there is past precedent that shows Japan can develop geothermal. So in the early 1970s, after the first oil crisis, Japan launched an initiative called the Sunshine Project, which was aimed at promoting alternative energy sources, including solar, hydrogen, and geothermal. And because of this strong political initiative, by the late 1990s, Japan managed to develop dozens of geothermal power plants across the country. But eventually, this enthusiasm started to stall when oil prices stabilized again, and Japan started introducing and relying on nuclear energy. But when the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant happened in 2011, that really dented the country's confidence in nuclear power, and it became another turning point. Japan now hopes to triple geothermal output by 2030. Businesses and local governments are looking at more than 50 possible sites to develop geothermal power plants.

So it sounds like there's a will, but I guess the question still is, is there a way, given all those obstacles?

Well, the government is also looking at the next generation of geothermal technology. Recently, it signed an agreement with America to collaborate on research for supercritical geothermal, which involves drilling very deep wells to access ultra hot fluids. And one expert I spoke to reckons we with these advanced technology, Japan could maybe generate 10% of its electricity supply from geothermal power. As a point of comparison, America is trying to generate 8.5% by 2050. But it does still seem like, in the short term, conventional geothermal power plants is still an effective way to reduce Japan's carbon footprint. And the government has worked on ways to make it slightly easier to develop geothermal power plants. So geothermal development used to take a very long time in Japan, more than a decade because of all kinds of regulations and administrative hurdles. But they managed to shorten this timeline to eight years. And the government relaxed rules on developing national parkland around a decade ago.

But that still leaves the onsen owners, who are worried about all of this building.

There are some good case studies, like the Nakao plant, which I visited. So they've come up with a unique scheme to persuade the usual objectors. I spoke to Uchinon Masamitsu, who's a local hot spring owner in Okuhira Onsengo. He was talking about how hot water extracted at the plant is piped to local hot springs instead of being sent back to underground as they usually are. He called this situation a win win. This is a very good, hopeful example where these two parties managed to collaborate, so the possibilities seem to be endless.

Moeka, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you so much for having.

If you enjoy our podcasts, we think you should know about an app from the Economist called Espresso. It offers concise takes on big global stories. The World in Brief gives you the very latest news in bite sized form, updated throughout the day. There are five short articles offering quick reads and analysis on critical developments. There's a daily chart, a fact of the day, a quote of the day, a little brain teasing quiz. It's a diverse little digest to get you primed for the day in just a couple of minutes. If you already subscribe to the Economist, Espresso is available to you now. But if you don't, go to economist.com getespressoapp to find out more. For all the high tech and digital wizardry of much of modern medicine, there's one thing that's more or less just as it was centuries ago, the hypodermic needle. Now, using inspiration from the natural world, that may be about to change. Insects have all kinds of ways of injecting and piercing and probing their prey and mimicking that natural tech could help take the sting out of doctor's appointments.

Hypodermic needles are incredibly effective at what they do.

David Neal Adam writes about science and technology for the Economist.

But they are essentially just hollow, pointy tubes. They're very basic and that does cause some problems that researchers are hoping to solve.

What kind of problems do you mean?

Well, I think anyone who's had an injection will know that they can often be a painful experience both during and after. And in fact, about one in four people say that they have a fear of needles. And that can have a real impact. That can stop people getting treatment, as we saw in some people with the COVID vaccine. Some people didn't want to get the COVID vaccine because they were scared of the needle. And it's not just that needles are painful, but the function of needles inside the body can be improved as well then.

So why is it that researchers are looking to the insect world to tackle some of these issues?

So insects do this Better than us. They have evolved to find brilliant ways of piercing the skin. And, you know, mosquitoes bite, wasps lay eggs. So essentially, they become a very useful way of trying to copy from nature to find better ways of doing it. For example, some insects, we know that use anesthetic chemicals to sort of numb the pain, but others have developed very clever physical attributes to help insert themselves kind of without us even noticing. And the researchers think that taking lessons from those insects can make injections for us less painful, more precise, and more effective.

How do you mean? In what way, though?

The most obvious example is a mosquito. I think pretty much everyone has been bitten by a mosquito, but often you don't notice until afterwards. And one of the reasons for that is that mosquitoes are very good at biting without actually hurting. And one of the ways they're able to do that is they kind of have serrated mouthparts. And what that does is it lowers the force that the mosquito needs to break the skin to puncture the skin. And that equals less pain, essentially. And scientists have copied that design. And in fact, one paper, they found that building a needle around that design required more than a quarter less force to insert the needle than an ordinary needle. And that's very useful, partly because it causes less pain, but also, if you insert a needle with less force, it kind of does less collateral damage as you puncture the body. And so that allows for more accurate targeting of where you want the needle to go.

Right, and you suggested that beyond just getting past the skin, there's some advantages to looking to nature for what goes on actually inside.

Yeah. So not all needles are just used to pierce the skin. Some needles have to go quite deep into tissue. For example, if you were taking out a small piece to do a biopsy. And one of the insects, that's a very good model here is wasps, because wasps need to be able to pierce sometimes other animals, sometimes trees, wood, fruit, to place their eggs. And they have to place the eggs. It's not just about injecting them. So what they do is they have this called an oviposte. Think of it as sort of a. You know those telescopes that can expand, they start off very short, but they've got little bits hidden inside them. It's a bit like that. And as it pierces, whatever it is it's piercing, it still has the ability to then extend and to steer itself, or to steer this bit of itself, to be able to very precisely place the eggs where it wants to. So scientists, for example, in the Netherlands, at the Delft University of Technology. They've made needles that copy this design. They're very thin, less than a millimeter thick, but they can be up to sort of 20 centimeters long. And that means that they can not only pierce the skin, but they can kind of be steered as they're going into the tissue without it buckling, without it breaking, which is obviously very important. And it's not just insects, actually. There are worms, if you can believe it, are being looked at as well for possible inspiration. There's a particular parasitic worm called the spiny headed worm. And what it does, it puts this thing in and then it swells at the end. Once this sort of piercing device is in the skin, that means it sticks there. It can't really be taken out. It doesn't fall out easily. And so scientists are trying to build needles based on this parasitic worm that can do the same in the human body to stay in place.

So you say scientists are trying, you suggest that studies show this. How close is this to actually being put into use? When do I get the painless injection?

Well, I guess one of the issues is that the bog standard hypodermic needle is very cheap. It can be mass produced because it is a very simple design. It's affordable. These are more complicated. They'd have to be made in a different way, and that pushes up the price. So at the moment, these are at the research stage, but I think we all know, you know, there are billions of needles used every year, so there's a huge market for better needles. And I think people would be clearly drawn to more painless needles. And if I think we know that even before the pandemic, we were using something like 16 billion hypodermic needles a year. So there's definitely a demand there. And I think for people with a fear of needles and all of us who have had painful injections at some point, commercializing these ideas really can't come soon enough.

David, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

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