Partygate: here’s a shot of Boris Johnson at a Downing Street party that took place during Covid-19 lockdown. Did he mislead Parliament about them?
This could be the stupidest blunder in a lifetime of stupid blunders for Boris Johnson.
It seems that, because his defence against allegations that he misled Parliament is being bankrolled by the public (with around a quarter of a million pounds spent so far), Johnson’s lawyers have to provide the Cabinet Office with all information relevant to his behaviour during the times concerned.
Such information was contained in his diary – but after reading it, officials reported Johnson to the police in both London and Thames Valley.
Apparently it contains information on further breaches of the rule against mixing with other people during the Covid-19 lockdowns between June 2020 and May 2021.
Both police services refer to breaches of the Health Protection Regulations.
Here’s some meat to cover the bones of this story:
Just to explain, because the Cabinet Office is paying Boris Johnson's multi-hundred-thousand-pound legal bills, it is technically the client in his defence against the privileges cttee. His lawyers are therefore obliged to submit all material they obtain to the CabOff. Its… https://t.co/j5Kv3PkLIY
Some of us haven’t moved on from his libelling of Jeremy Corbyn, back in 2018 (his apology for doing so remains the most-shared tweet ever published by a Conservative MP). Or from his suggestion that the online reporter who revealed the libel should be castrated. Or, indeed, from his desire to starve hungry children by denying the extension of free school meals in holidays during the Covid-19 lockdown periods.
Perhaps Mr Bradley should have kept his mouth shut.
Then again, perhaps Johnson should have kept his mouth shut too, when he said he had no knowledge of any Covid-19 rule breaches involving him.
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I was away from the office when Boris Johnson gave his evidence to the Privileges Committee’s Partygate Inquiry.
This means I haven’t seen any of his evidence myself – yet. I have read and seen a few commentaries on it and my spot response is the same as this:
More to follow.
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Boris Johnson: his evidence to the Partygate inquiry might be quite short – after all, his inquisitors really have only to show him this image of himself at a party he said he never attended and ask him if he was there.
This is one to put in your diary:
Boris Johnson will give public evidence about whether he misled MPs over Partygate on [Wednesday] March 22, the Privileges Committee has confirmed.
The former prime minister will be questioned by the cross-party committee from 14:00 GMT in a televised session.
But Mr Johnson has rejected this and said he believes the process will “vindicate” him.
I’m looking forward to this one, very much!
In fact, I might have a ‘Partygate party’ and invite friends to watch it with me. Wanna come along?
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Boris Johnson not participating in a Downing Street party.
Boris Johnson is to give evidence to the Parliamentary inquiry into whether he knowingly misled MPs about parties at 10 Downing Street during Covid-19 lockdown, in a few weeks.
The inquiry has finally received all the documentary evidence it requested from Number 10 (apparently staff started shredding information and discussing the stories they would tell as soon as the story broke that parties had been happening, so it will be interesting to see what has been received).
ITV’s Paul Brand, who broke the Partygate story back in late 2021, has launched a podcast discussing what happened – and what will happen – and discussed it with the hosts of Good Morning Britain.
It features interviews with people who were directly involved in what was happening and will include new revelations, as he revealed:
It’s interesting that it’s said Theresa May would have been shocked if she had been PM and parties were found to have been going on downstairs.
But Theresa May’s opinions are now notoriously changeable: as PM she forbade ministers from visiting Saudi Arabia because of world events at the time, but as a backbencher she has been happy to rake in the money by giving a speech there.
Also interesting is the revelation that people in Downing Street were shocked that Johnson denied knowledge of the parties – and “started shredding evidence immediately – as soon as those claims started coming out; corroborating their stories; preparing for the Metropolitan Police investigation and Sue Gray’s investigation”.
The podcast – Partygate: The Inside Story – is available (for example) here.
The pundits point out that the investigation could have Johnson removed from Parliament for good – if he’s suspended there could be a by-election. And he won’t come back as PM (to replace Rishi Sunak) because if he does, Partygate comes back with him.
Phil Moorhouse expands on these points on his A Different Bias channel, here:
The really interesting part of this one is that Johnson supporters like Nadine Dorries and the Conservative Democratic Organisation may actually turn other Tories against him with their agitating for him to replace Sunak.
Their timetable is likely to be that, after a major Conservative loss of council seats at the elections in May, they will launch a “confidence” vote against Sunak as soon as they can, which is a year after he became PM – some time in November, most likely.
Sunak would win this vote, but not overwhelmingly, which is fatal for a sitting prime minister. He’d be on his way out, paving the way for Johnson to return…
Unless he is found guilty of at least not correcting the record or of knowingly lying to Parliament and the Privileges Committee (in charge of the inquiry) recommends a punishment.
If that’s a suspension of at least 10 days, there will be a recall petition in his constituency which will be successful. He will lose his Parliamentary seat and there will be a by-election in which he may stand – but will lose.
And then he won’t be able to stand against Sunak because he won’t be a member of Parliament.
I love the part of this clip where Phil says Johnson’s defence is “that he is monumentally stupid and cannot recognise a party when he sees one”!
Whatever happens, it’s looking bad for Boris Johnson.
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This is a bit of fun filler from YouTube. I don’t think even Phil Moorhouse of A Different Bias takes the threat of Boris Johnson returning to Downing Street seriously:
The takeouts from this are that:
Rishi Sunak is prime minister because he is boring – and the Tories want people to be bored by politics right now because the news is dire and they want to hide it from us.
The UK is going into (who are we kidding? We’re already in it!) a major recession and the Tories are the cause.
The Tories are likely to lose a huge number of council seats in the local elections in May.
Boris Johnson is just too damned noisy; if he’s brought back, he’ll draw attention to all the horrible things that are happening, and that’s the last thing the Tories want.
The headline for political writers like Yr Obdt Srvt is that we must draw as much attention as possible to all the political news that the Tories and their clients in the mainstream media want to bury.
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Speak no evil: but Boris Johnson doesn’t seem capable of holding his mouth shut.
Claims from Downing Street that Boris Johnson will remain prime minister until October are not true, it seems.
The timings of a successor’s election are managed by the backbench 1922 Committee and the Conservative Party Board, and Johnson has no power over them.
Also, when he discussed the prime minister’s resignation with him, 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady did not make any agreement that Johnson could remain in Downing Street until October.
The 1922 Committee controls the first part of the process – whittling the number of candidates down to two – and this could be completed as soon as July 21, when Parliament goes into recess for the summer.
Then the Tory Party Board takes over to put these candidates to a vote of party members – and this could be carried out by the end of August.
Meanwhile, there is a loud – and growing – demand for Johnson to leave immediately, with a “caretaker” PM installed for the duration of the leadership contest.
Considering the apparent falsehoods being put about by Johnson and his team, even about his departure, this should come as no surprise to anybody.
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Why is Boris Johnson’s government so determined to be dishonest all the time?
Yesterday (June 20), Downing Street was adamantly refusing to comment on whether the government had intervened to force The Times to drop its damning story about Boris Johnson wanting to hire then-Carrie Symonds into the Foreign Office for £100,000.
Now the prime minister’s office has given up its pretence and
confirmed it contacted the newspaper on Friday night and asked it to retract the story.
But:
Contrary to online speculation, there is no superinjunction or specific legal issue preventing reporting of the story.
Handy, that – it means those of us who have been repeating the story left, right and centre won’t face reprisals for doing so.
But that leaves us asking: what was the point?
This Site and others have already mentioned the so-called “Streisand Effect”, whereby efforts to remove a story from the Internet only increase public interest in it.
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Boris Johnson tries to understand how this internet thing works: okay, this wasn’t how the Mumsnet interview was conducted but it conveys our pathetic prime minister’s failure to understand what was going on and that his silly lines wouldn’t work there.
Boris Johnson’s big excuse for refusing to resign in the wake of revelations of a corrupt party culture at 10 Downing Street while the rest of the UK was in Covid-19 lockdown is that it would be “irresponsible” to go in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis that he created and a foreign war that has little to do with him at all.
What?
He said the Partygate revelations had been “a totally miserable experience” for people in government.
What? What’s miserable about partying regularly while everybody else in the country was forcibly separated – according to rules that Johnson himself made but unilaterally decided did not apply to him?
Questioned on Mumsnet, Johnson gave a very poor account of himself. He said,
“I think that on why am I still here, I’m still here because we’ve got huge pressures economically, we’ve got to get on, you know, we’ve got the biggest war in Europe for 80 years, and we’ve got a massive agenda to deliver which I was elected to deliver.
“I’ve thought about all these questions a lot, as you can imagine, and I just cannot see how actually it’d be responsible right now – given everything that is going on simply to abandon a) the project which I embarked on but b)…”
and that’s as far as he got before somebody cut him off.
He said he was “very, very surprised” and “taken aback” that he was fined for attending his surprise birthday party in the Cabinet room because it “felt like a work event” despite Sue Gray publishing photos of him swigging beer from a can at the time.
Let’s remember that the only kind of “work event” allowed at the time was a meeting to discuss business. None of the rules Johnson himself announced to the nation ever said parties involving the consumption of alcohol could take place at people’s place of work.
But then, perhaps we should not be surprised that Johnson tried to wheedle his way out of guilt for attending that party (and all the others for which he unaccountably was not fined) with a false interpretation of his rules.
After all, the very first question in the interview was: “Why should we believe anything you say when it’s been proven you’re a habitual liar?”
For goodness’ sake – this is a man who can’t even string a reasonable argument together to save his own skin.
For the good of us all, he has to be removed from the UK’s politics.
Does anyone have the guts to get that job done?
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Boozy Johnson: this is not an image of him at the Downing Street garden party on May 20, 2020 (it was actually taken in 2019) but it serves to suggest his behaviour there quite adequately.
The easy answer to the question in the headline is: no, he should have known his parties broke the law.
I say “his” parties because they were parties at 10 Downing Street, his home and place of work, taking place directly under his nose and that he attended in many instances. They were part of a “party culture” created during his watch.
And I say he should have known they broke the law because he announced to all of us what the law was – and it didn’t allow for social gatherings in a work setting, by the way. Furthermore, evidence in the Sue Gray report shows that his aides certainly did know that these events were legally questionable because they took steps to prevent the press from finding out about them.
Let’s discuss the party in the Downing Street garden on the evening of May 20, 2020 when Covid-19 regulations stated that “participating in a gathering of more than two persons in public was prohibited except where the gathering was ‘essential for work purposes'”, but had been amended to allow “meetings outdoors for exercise or recreation with one person from another household”.
Clearly an after-hours drinks event in the garden of 10 Downing Street, with more than 200 people invited to socialise with each other – even if socially-distanced – would have been a flagrant breach of these regulations.
It would have been a gathering of more than two persons in public that was not essential for work purposes, and it would have been a meeting outdoors between multiple people from more than one other household.
This did not stop Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, from advertising it by email, while other officials requested that tables be put out by the “Internal Events” team – which This Writer would have thought clearly marks this out as an illegal social occasion.
Alcohol was available at the event – both supplied by officials and also via a request for attendees to “Bring your own booze!”
In total, around 200 staff were invited although it is believed attendance was around 40 – still a massive breach of the regulations at the time.
Here’s the punchline: those arranging the event – including Reynolds – knew it was against the rules because they went to lengths to hide it from members of the media who attended a press conference just before it was due to take place.
According to the Gray Report, a Number 10 special advisor sent this message to Reynolds:
Just to flag that the press conference will probably be finishing around that time, so helpful if people can be mindful of that as speakers and cameras are leaving, not walking around waving bottles of wine etc”.
Martin Reynolds replied:
“Will do my best!….”
The report continues:
A No 10 Director declined the invitation and told the investigation that they had raised with either Martin Reynolds or his office that it was not a good idea.
Lee Cain, the then No 10 Director of Communications (a special adviser), also
received the invitation. In response, he emailed Martin Reynolds, No 10 official (1),
and Dominic Cummings at 14.35 on 20 May 2020 stating: “I’m sure it will be fine –
and I applaud the gesture – but a 200 odd person invitation for drinks in the garden
of no 10 is somewhat of a comms risk in the current environment.” Lee Cain says
he subsequently spoke to Martin Reynolds and advised him that the event should
be cancelled. Martin Reynolds does not recall any such conversation. In addition,
Dominic Cummings has also said that he too raised concerns, in writing. We have
not found any documentary evidence of this.
Referring to the event itself, it is clear that – once again – Boris Johnson attended and participated fully:
The Prime Minister attended at approximately 18.00 for around 30 minutes to thank staff before returning to his office with Martin Reynolds for a meeting at 18.30.
So he was there with Martin Reynolds, who knew it was an illegal gathering. He should have known himself that it was an illegal gathering, being the government representative who had explained the rules to the rest of us. But he not only allowed it to happen but attended and spent 30 minutes with the 40 staff there.
The excuse that he only stopped by to thank staff for their work during the Covid crisis doesn’t make sense because it does not take 30 minutes to make a brief speech of thanks. It seems clear that Johnson was himself socialising with staff, adding his own household to all the others that should not have been mixing at that time, according to the rules that he had put in place.
How strange that the Metropolitan Police who investigated this event, and must have known that it was an illegal party attended by the prime minister, chose not to fine him for this flagrant law-breaking! How convenient for them that their Acting Commissioner was able to dismiss this omission simply by declaring that, as far as he was concerned, all the decisions were above-board!
Reynolds, who subsequently had a meeting with Johnson inside 10 Downing Street, sent a WhatsApp message to a special advisor later in the evening, which appears to be about a story in the press:
[Martin Reynolds] [19:36] “Best of luck – a complete non story but better than them focusing on our drinks (which we seem to have got away with).”
In the light of all this evidence, it is not credible for Boris Johnson to claim that he had not fallen foul of rules in the Ministerial Code because he had not broken the law on purpose.
He should have known himself that the event broke his rules because he was the one who laid them down for us all.
His principal private secretary certainly knew that the event broke Johnson’s own rules, and attended the event with Johnson. Considering the contents of his electronic correspondence, it seems extremely unlikely that he did not mention to Johnson that the event was illegal.
Also, if the event was not against the rules, why was everybody involved so tight-lipped about it, to the point of hiding it from the media?
And this is just one of many such parties.
It doesn’t matter what Johnson says – the evidence exposes him as a liar.
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Lord Geidt: he has said the only reason he didn’t offer advice to Boris Johnson on how to conduct himself within the Ministerial Code is he would have had to resign if Johnson didn’t take it. This implies that he expected Johnson not to, doesn’t it?
Boris Johnson’s desperation to hold on to power while exercising it in only silly and pointless ways is becoming increasingly blatant with every passing day.
The latest development is a demand by Johnson’s standards advisor, Lord Geidt, for the prime minister to explain why his fine for breaching Covid-19 laws by attending a party does not break the Ministerial Code duty to comply with the law.
Johnson’s only response is the legally illiterate claim that “paying a fixed penalty notice is not a criminal conviction”. Maybe not – but it is a criminal sanction. People don’t get fined if they haven’t broken a law – and the Code’s conventions demand that ministers breaking the law must resign.
In his annual report on ministers’ interests, Geidt said the Partygate fine meant “a legitimate question has arisen as to whether those facts alone might have constituted a breach of the overarching duty within the ministerial code of complying with the law”.
Even if Johnson thought there was no breach, Geidt stated that he “should respond accordingly, setting out his case in public.”
Do you think he will?
This is just the latest evidence that, as a recent Guardian editorial claimed, the UK is “not being governed seriously in very serious times”.
Anxiety that the UK is rudderless while Johnson desperately tries to bail himself out of trouble that he caused won’t be dispelled by current government policy, the writer claims – because it has been formulated purely to distract us from the prime minister’s illegal antics:
There can be no other purpose for the proposal to restore trade in imperial units. The tiny number of people who will be thrilled by the restoration of a right to exclude metric measurements from displays of goods will be hugely outnumbered by the people, including many Conservatives, who can smell the decay in such gimmickry.
Reports of a plan to lift the prohibition on expanding grammar schools belongs in a similar category, although it sounds weightier. This is a zombie policy that staggers on in the Tory imagination as a solution to problems of social mobility, despite ample evidence that selective education has the opposite effect. If Mr Johnson thinks his levelling up agenda will be enlivened by reviving discredited schools policy, he will be disappointed.
The same unoriginal impulse is being brought to ignite a proposed bonfire of EU regulation – the function of the “Brexit freedoms bill” announced in the Queen’s speech. Sunset clauses will be retroactively scattered across the body of retained European law, so that they expire regardless of whether a suitable replacement has been conceived. It is a wildly irresponsible idea, conceived in the delusional realm of Europhobic imaginations where every British economic problem has its origin in Brussels directives. In reality, it means legislating for deliberate uncertainty, as if the goal is deterring investment.
The writer goes on to make this bold statement: “the harder the prime minister scrapes the bottom of the policy barrel, the more desperate he looks.
“But the task of political survival is now consuming all of the energy that should be applied to running the country… Conservative MPs.. can have Mr Johnson as their leader, or they can have a functional government; not both.”
Sadly, even this is not true.
There is no evidence to suggest that a Tory government will function any more adequately without Boris Johnson than with him; considering the alternatives, they all have to go.
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