I sympathise with Boris Johnson’s county court kerfuffle

Poor old Boris Johnson. Elected on a mandate to get Brexit done, he then faces a wholly unpredicted global crisis, contracts coronavirus himself, gets embroiled in claims of a sex scandal and faces accusations of playing fast and loose with the rules in order to get someone else to pay for a new sofa. The man can’t catch a break.

No matter that 128,000 people have died in this country after catching Covid; and never mind that the prime minister spent the kind of money on his flat renovations in Downing Street that most people could only dream of. Judging by the results of the recent local elections, the man who has spent half his career acting the clown is still able to walk a political high wire.

This week it emerged that on top of everything else, Johnson had an outstanding county court judgment against him in relation to an unpaid debt of £535. For a while, speculation was rife that it related to some cushions or a throw, purchased as part of the Downing Street refurb.

But no, instead it seems that a lady called Yvonne Hobbs had brought a small claim against the prime minister for alleged defamation and that judgment had been entered against him in the absence of any defence being filed.

Here at last I found myself in genuine sympathy with our scarecrow leader, for I have – more or less – been in his shoes.

I had come to London for work after university, and after a few months I moved into a rented flat with my girlfriend and another couple. It was a nice place in zone 3, but things didn’t work out on the relationship front and so we handed in our notice, on the understanding that we had a break clause in our lease after six months. Each of us made arrangements to move elsewhere.

Then came a bombshell letter from our landlord’s solicitors, informing us that our notice was not valid, that any break clause had not been legitimately triggered and that we were on the hook to pay the remainder of the rent for the full year of our tenancy. If we refused to cough up, we would face action in what was then called the small claims court.

For a bunch of 22-year-olds this was not a happy prospect; and since I was the cause of our departure from the flat, I felt completely hideous about it.

But then we spotted that the property was already being remarketed, which indicated that the landlord had in fact accepted our notice. His solicitors denied it, and pressed ahead with their threatened court action. We, emboldened, issued a counter-claim for return of our deposit and that seemed to do the trick. Our landlord, having hidden behind his lawyers, called me to ask if we could agree to drop both claims and just call it quits. We agreed, full of relief.

A couple of months later, however, another letter arrived, telling us that a county court judgment had been entered against us by default in relation to the original claim, and we must now pay up. I rang the landlord’s solicitors in a rage, to discover they had failed to notify the court of the discontinuation of the case. Eventually they agreed to confirm the position and the judgment was finally set aside.

Yet that was not the end of it, because it emerged that the record of the original court decision was not wiped from my credit record. For the next few years, whenever I moved to a new place, an apparently unpaid debt returned to haunt me. Each time I had to visit the court to seek new confirmation that I wasn’t on the run from the law.

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On one occasion, a new landlord was apologetic about the need for the extra checks. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a hardened criminal!” he joked. I reassured him that it was simply the product of a legal confrontation over a previous tenancy, which went down surprisingly badly.

Like me, Boris has had his county court judgment set aside. I wonder if it will crop up on his record when he next looks for a new house? Then again, for as long as he’s got the hugely forgiving British electorate for a landlord, there’s no need to move – especially now he’s got his current place looking just right.