Many years ago, I did a "drive around" with some police officers and a client, who was a prolific thief, specialising in thefts from cars, and who wanted a clean start at the end of his case.
For several hours, we drove round the force area whilst my client...
...spontaneously confessed to offences he had committed in pretty much every car park, beauty spot or layby we went past. There were, it must be said, many of them. A lot of them the police already knew about, and a few they already suspected by client of committing.
The vast majority of them, however, were not evidentially linked to my client in any way. It was likely that, had he not decided that he genuinely wished to turn over a new leaf and admit to them, they never would have been.
In the end, it clocked in at over 100 offences, and we only stopped because we had reached the boundaries of the police force's jurisdiction. The officers, who had, in the space of a few hours, achieved the highest clear-up rate in their force, were delighted.
There was an element of calculation to my client's actions. He was an old hand, and he knew that there comes a point where this stuff doesn't add anything more to your sentence, so you might as well cough to it, so it becomes essentially a freebie
But he also knew that he was looking at a stretch and he genuinely wanted to make it his last. He had a kid on the way, he wanted to put his various bad habits behind him and sort himself out, and he felt a conscience clearing exercise was the best start to that.
He was the sort of person who the current occupants of Downing Street wouldn't piss on if he was on fire. A junkie, a scrote. A person who's only value to them was as a bogeyman to scare trembling boomers into voting for ever longer prison sentences.
And yet this lad, who had none of the benefits of education, or ettiquette training or socialisation that they've got, knew what they apparently do not:
which is that if you're genuinely apologising for something, if you're doing it because you're genuinely sorry and you want to be better, then you admit your wrongdoing in a clean sweep, not piecemeal and reluctantly as each new piece of evidence came out.
Which is why I'm pretty confident in my assessment that Johnson and his coterie of poshboy pissheads are genuinely more dishonest than the most prolific thief I've ever met.
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