‘I thought it was me as a doctor’: 10 of the best political excuses ever

From Boris Johnson to Rudy Giuliani, top politicians have come up with some imaginative justifications for alleged misbehavior.

Donald Trump had to backpedal Monday after triggering criticism from his evangelical Christian allies for sharing an image that appeared to depict himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man. 

In classic Trump style, the U.S. president did not offer an apology for the picture, but instead told the media that, ‘’I thought it was me as a doctor.”

His reasoning sparked ridicule on the internet — and got us thinking about the greatest political excuses ever.

Here are 10 of the best. 

‘I don’t sweat’

In 2019, then-Prince Andrew gave a televised interview on BBC addressing allegations that he had sexual relations with Virginia Giuffre on multiple occasions.

Giuffre, one of the women who accused convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein of exploiting her, claimed that, during one encounter, Andrew had been sweating heavily while dancing with her.

Andrew denied the encounter. He then went further in the now-notorious interview, offering what he presented as evidence, saying that he was unable to sweat at the time due to a medical condition, which resulted from an adrenaline overdose when he served in combat as a helicopter pilot during the Falklands War.

As he put it, “There’s a slight problem with the sweating, because I have a peculiar medical condition, which is that I don’t sweat — or I didn’t sweat at the time.”

Thought it ‘was a work event’

Let’s cast our minds back to May 2020, when people across the U.K. were living under strict Covid lockdown restrictions. Families were kept apart and social gatherings were effectively off limits. 

Meanwhile, in what would later be dubbed “Partygate,” reports emerged that government staff, including then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had been holding social gatherings. Among them was a notable “bring your own booze” event in the Downing Street garden on May 20, 2020.

Johnson’s defense? That he had “implicitly believed that this was a work event.” An interesting description for a boozy garden gathering, to say the least.

Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser at the time, also sparked outrage in 2020 after traveling more than 250 miles from London to Durham.

Cummings argued the trip was necessary to secure childcare if he and his wife became ill. But it was a second explanation that really raised eyebrows. Cummings admitted to taking another 30-minute drive to the historic Barnard Castle to test his “eyesight” before making the longer return journey to London.

The idea that a long drive was needed to check whether he could safely drive home became one of the most infamous excuses of the pandemic.

‘Watching badgers’

Ron Davies, a Cabinet member under former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was forced to leave politics after the Sun newspaper reported he’d been seen leaving a well-known gay cruising spot off the M4 motorway. 

Davies, by then a Welsh assembly member, initially denied the reports. But after photographs emerged of him loitering in the woods, he claimed to have been in the area “watching badgers” — perhaps oblivious to the fact that he was unlikely to spot the nocturnal animal during his daylight escapade. 

It was the second time Davies had to resign over his open-air activities. A few years earlier he quit as Blair’s Welsh secretary following an incident he described as a “moment of madness” in Clapham Common — another popular cruising spot — where he was robbed after meeting up with a stranger.

Wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident

Silvio Berlusconi intervened via his aides in 2010 to make sure an underage Moroccan belly dancer was released from police custody in Milan. 

To justify the intervention, Berlusconi said he thought that 17-year-old Karima El Mahroug, also known as “Ruby the Heart Stealer,” was the niece of Egypt’s then-President Hosni Mubarak and that he wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident.

The catch? Ruby said later at trial she had received thousands of euros from Berlusconi at the “bunga bunga” parties he held in his villa in Arcore — infamous events which triggered years of legal action.

In 2015, Italy’s top court acquitted Berlusconi of charges of paying for sex with an underage girl, finding that the former prime minister genuinely believed that Ruby was 18 at the time of their meetings.

Getting semantical

In January 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton tried to scotch rumors then absorbing Washington with what became possibly the most famous sentence of his presidency: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The woman was Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern in her early 20s.

Clinton’s efforts to kill the story failed spectacularly and questions about their relationship dominated the U.S. political scene for the entire year and beyond. To the extent that his denial was truthful, his subsequent admissions suggested it depended on a very unusual and narrow definition of “sexual relations.”

The president’s sentence-parsing skills were further in evidence when he testified later before a grand jury with perhaps his second-best known sentence: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” 

In the aftermath of the affair, he became the second U.S. president to be impeached. He was acquitted by the Senate.

Working too hard

Nothing says man of the people like … forgetting which football team you allegedly support and then blaming it on how damn hard you’re working.

Then-British PM David Cameron, a public relations man by trade, scored an own goal on the 2015 general election campaign trail when he said in a speech that he wanted Brits to back West Ham. The only problem? Cameron had long claimed to be an Aston Villa fan.

Cameron blamed the whole thing on “a brain fade.”

And he insisted: “I’m a Villa fan … I must have been overcome by something … these things sometimes happen when you are on the stump.” 

His other favorite team, Manchester Hotspur, could not be reached for comment.

‘It was tractors I was looking at’

Busted for watching porn on his phone in parliament, British MP Neil Parish insisted in 2022 he had been lured to erotic content by accident while searching for tractors.

“Funnily enough it was tractors I was looking at and so I did get into another website that has sort of a very similar name. And I watched it for a bit, which I shouldn’t have done,” he admitted to the BBC. 

Allies suggested that this was a natural mistake for a Devon farmer, who was innocently looking for “Dominator” combine harvesters. It became clear, however, that Parish had returned to the porn site while waiting to vote, and he resigned.

‘Nothing in the law’ says you need a bank account

Bertie Ahern was once an unassailable figure in Ireland, the country he governed for 11 years from 1997 until 2008. By 2025, he was too toxic for his Fianna Fáil party to countenance nominating him for president.

Key to his downfall was the Mahon Tribunal into allegations of corrupt payments to politicians. Ahern was quizzed over lodgements he made in 1993, during his term as finance minister, representing three times his annual net income. 

Ahern explained these were checks he had accrued during six years without a bank account after separating from his wife — a situation he considered to be perfectly normal, even for the keeper of the country’s finances. He said there was “nothing in the law or the constitution” requiring someone to have a bank account.

“Some people put their hair yellow, some people put rings in their noses … I decided to cash my checks, full stop,” he told the tribunal in December 2007.

Ahern was forced to resign five months later, citing the distraction of the tribunal. Its final report in 2012 made no finding of corruption against Ahern, but found substantial parts of his evidence to be “untrue.”

‘I was tucking in my shirt’

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was caught in a compromising position in Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical flick “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” a character-driven social experiment disguised as a documentary.

In the scene, the Trump ally followed an actress — who was impersonating a reporter — into a hotel bedroom, then laid back on the bed and put his hands down his trousers. 

Not everything was exactly as it seemed, however, according to Giuliani. 

“The Borat video is a complete fabrication. I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment,” Giuliani posted on social media. “At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.”

The lottery tickets were for my grandchildren

In 2023, Didier Reynders, former European commissioner for justice and former Belgian deputy prime minister, came under investigation over allegations of money laundering. The probe centered on suspicions that he had purchased large quantities of lottery tickets and used any winnings to reintroduce “clean” money into his bank accounts.

In early 2025, Belgian media reported that when a shopkeeper questioned why he was buying so many lottery tickets, Reynders replied that they were for his “grandchildren.”

Reynders has denied any wrongdoing in the ongoing probe.

Sonja Rijnen, Matt Honeycombe-Foster, Stephen Fidler, Mari Eccles, Giorgio Leali, Christian Oliver, Ali Walker and Rory O’Neill contributed reporting to this article.