Sue Gray Report – winegumtelegram

Boris If gun culture was as prevalent here as it is in the US – yet one more example this week highlighting just how prevalent, of course – I reckon Boris Johnson could probably get away with ‘accidentally’ shooting dead a member of the Cabinet and declaring he didn’t recognise his trigger-happy actions as murder or even manslaughter; he’d no doubt face angry calls for his head at PMQs and still survive as PM, brazenly blustering his way through a denial that those lackeys he hadn’t killed would applaud and support in the face of Opposition outrage. He’d apologise to his dead colleague’s widow and then say it was time to ‘move on’. The incumbent Prime Minister would be able to evade justice because he’s surrounded by deliberately-chosen mediocrities on his own side and confronted by hapless no-hopers on the other, giving him the kind of leeway no other PM in living memory has ever been able to enjoy. I should imagine all of his surviving predecessors are green-eyed when it comes to his good fortune, not to mention envying the apparent apathy of the general public towards his shameless bullshit.

After months of column inches devoted to exposing what Boris did during the pandemic war, Sue Gray’s ‘Partygate’ report – in as un-redacted a version as we could hope to expect – has finally been published, and the forced apologies are in full swing, especially in relation to the way in which some of the menials at No.10 were treated by those present at the restriction-breaking ‘work events’ held during lockdown – though probably no different from how Boris treated his luckless ‘fag’ at Eton. ‘I have been as surprised and disappointed as anyone else in this House as the revelations have unfolded,’ said Boris without a hint of irony in the Commons, ‘and, frankly, I have been appalled by some of the behaviour, particularly in the treatment of the security and the cleaning staff. And I’d like to apologise to those members of staff and I expect anyone who behaved that way to apologise to them as well.’ One might almost imagine he hadn’t been there were it not for the photographs that emerged on ITV News in the days leading up to the publication of the report.

Certainly, from some of the descriptions in the Gray report, a Downing Street concept of a party bears more of a relation to the kind of juvenile bash teenagers indulge in when their parents are out for the evening, the kind where some drink alcohol for the first time and the carpet is consequently exposed to the inevitable end results. Once the grownups are back in the room, cue a major league bollocking from dad, followed by a cleanup campaign by the guilty, with threats of being grounded for weeks echoing in their ears. I suppose the main difference here is that there were no parents to come home and restore order; the more junior civil servants present took their lead from the senior attendees, assuming it was okay to be there and to get stuck in because Boris and chums were doing likewise and exercising little in the way of authority; the image is of unsupervised children being allowed to run wild – like ‘Lord of the Flies’ with karaoke.

‘The senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture,’ says Gray, laying blame firmly at the door of Downing Street and those who, in theory, are supposed to be the grownups there. The infamous shindig held the night before the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh in April last year officially ended at 4.20am, which at least shows the partygoers didn’t merely reserve their contempt for the lower orders whose lives they’d made a misery with regulations they themselves declined to adhere to; the lack of respect towards Her Majesty, which one naturally expects at such a moment, is pretty glaring. However, the first prominent ‘work event’ scrutinised in the report took place on 20 May 2020, a garden party at No.10 attended by around 30-40 people; it was a ‘bring your own booze’ gathering organised by the PM’s-then principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds. Mind you, there is at least an awareness that the party wasn’t strictly legit in a later WhatsApp message from Reynolds to a SPAD, in which the former opined ‘we seem to have got away with it’.

Another much-discussed work event, the so-called ‘Abba party’ held in the PM’s flat at No.10 on 13 November 2020 – one at which Carrie Antoinette was allegedly present – isn’t included amongst the 16 separate gatherings examined in Sue Gray’s report; the bash – apparently staged to mark the hasty exits of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain – was being investigated by Gray when the Met’s own investigation began, so she suspended her work for fear of prejudicing the police case. The Met are being a tad cagy about this one, admitting there were breaches of Covid regulations yet refusing to reveal how many attendees were fined; then again, it was hardly a unique occasion. The Met investigated 12 work events altogether, issuing Fixed Penalty Notices for eight of them, with 126 fines dished out to 83 people in total. As well as those gatherings already mentioned, there were also get-togethers on 18 and 19 June, 17 and 18 December (all 2020) and 14 January 2021, each resulting in retrospective fines.

‘Wine Time Fridays’ appear to have been introduced at No.10 as part of Boris’s charm offensive in the workplace, which seems like one more manifestation of his deep desire to be liked; were these placed on hiatus in the same way everyone else’s social life had to be during lockdown, I suspect most couldn’t care less if Downing Street staff enjoyed unwinding with a bottle at the end of the working week. That they carried on regardless when it was suddenly illegal to either hold or attend such gatherings is what irks and hurts those who were forced into isolation and alienation by lockdown. The Prime Minister, of course, continues to plead ignorance of his own emergency legislation that outlawed what he regarded as work events. ‘It’s clear from what Sue Gray had to say that some of these gatherings went on far longer than was necessary,’ he said whilst being repeatedly heckled in the Commons, ‘and they were clearly in breach of the rules and they fell foul of the rules.’ Your rules, mate.

Unfortunately, the photographic evidence so far doesn’t really support some of the more debauched descriptions of events at Downing Street, one of which features Boris and Rishi at the PM’s birthday ‘do’; shockingly, jugs of juice and M&S sandwiches can clearly be seen in this outrageous image! The fact the two were fined for being present at what resembles a coffee morning at a church hall perhaps yet again underlines the ridiculousness of the rules and restrictions we were all expected to abide by at the time – ditto Sir Keir and his beer. That none of our lord and masters chose to practice what they preached is one reason why this story refuses to go away in the face of rather more serious mounting issues since. Yes, they were quick to don their masks and visors when out and about in order to set a shining example to the rest of us; but once they were behind closed doors it was socially (un)distanced party time, something we were all told would probably be responsible for the death of granny – when the old dear was actually more likely to meet her maker after Matt Hancock sent her back to the care home.

Naturally, many broke lockdown rules and many remained free from having a police record; others weren’t so lucky. If, as we are occasionally informed, our politicians are only human too, I guess it’s no surprise some of them also broke the rules. Then again, members of the public who did likewise didn’t devise those rules in the first place and didn’t bombard the populace with a steady stream of propaganda, including threats of the dire consequences facing them if those rules were broken. The unravelling of Project Fear is embodied in the Partygate affair, though best not to get too complacent; who knows what treats they’ve got lined up for us re monkeypox, eh?

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Boris I’ve been asked the question several times over the past couple of weeks if I think Boris is toast. I’ve only refrained from replying in the affirmative because of the evident absence of contenders waiting in the wilderness for the call to mount a challenge. There’s no obvious Michael Heseltine figure building up support and no Geoffrey Howe moment giving such a candidate the ammunition to strike when the Prime Minister is at his most vulnerable. Right now, the members of the Cabinet appear too mindful of their own perilous positions to stick the knife in with a devastating resignation speech or risk a career by standing against Boris, and of those exiled to the backbenches, none have the political clout or popular appeal that seemed set to hand the reins of power to Heseltine in 1990. Perhaps the fact Mrs Thatcher’s former Defence Secretary famously failed in his bid is at the back of Ministers’ minds as they shuffle uneasily in their seats and watch on as Boris stands in the firing line following the publication of the Sue Gray report into the ‘alleged breaches of lockdown’ at Downing Street.

Certainly, this is the PM’s most testing time since he blustered his way into Downing Street in 2019, ousting an unpopular and ineffective predecessor, neutralising the Brexit deniers by proroguing Parliament and enjoying a brief bask in the glow of a landslide Election victory. Then…well, we all know as to how events (dear boy) took control of the narrative; always tempting to imagine a non-Covid parallel universe in which the damage done by Boris’s multiple personality flaws was minimal due to them not being unduly tested, maybe even a non-Covid parallel universe in which Dominic Cummings remained the Prime Minister’s Mandelson rather than coming back to haunt him as the ghost of parties past. But it was not to be. Boris Johnson faced an unprecedented crisis and, unlike his great hero and inspiration when confronted by the nation’s darkest hour, he blew it. Whatever comedic charm lingered from his days as a refreshing alternative to the production-line politicians so loathed by the electorate was well and truly exhausted and extinguished by the double standards at play during the coronavirus Project Fear.

Interestingly, the majority of the outrage emanating from the ramifications of Project Fear isn’t so much based around the anti-democratic nature of the restrictions themselves – not to mention the extreme manner of their policing; lest we forget, the Labour Party currently indulging in a socially-distanced foxtrot on the PM’s grave repeatedly wanted those restrictions extended even further into the private sphere. No, what has struck a nerve with the British public more than anything in the wake of all the revelations is that the sacrifices they were asked to make and the misery they were forced to endure throughout the numerous lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were not deemed sufficiently life-saving by those imposing them, those who took to our TV screens night after night to reiterate them in scaremongering, doom-laden language that implied following them was a do-or-die scenario. If the Government didn’t believe in them – and the behaviour of certain Ministers (including the First Lord of the Treasury himself) proves they didn’t – then they took us all for mugs. Well, that’s a bloody great surprise, isn’t it.

After dragging their heels in a fashion contrary to the way in which they vigorously policed the plebs during the lockdowns, the men from the Met have finally got their finger out and are apparently ‘investigating a gathering’ held in Boris’s Downing Street apartment, one that might possibly have breached the laws at the time. As has now become common knowledge, this gathering was no isolated incident within the ivory towers of the PM’s abode and the Met aren’t simply investigating this one non-party; they’re looking into all the others as well. According to the MSM, the Met investigations are responsible for the eagerly-anticipated Sue Gray report being published in an edited format, a bit like a trailer for the movie that remains frustratingly unreleased in its director’s cut. ‘As a result of the Metropolitan Police’s investigations, and so as not to prejudice the police investigation process,’ writes Gray, ‘they have told me that it would only be appropriate to make minimal reference to the gatherings on the dates they are investigating. Unfortunately, this necessarily means that I am extremely limited in what I can say about those events and it is not possible at present to provide a meaningful report setting out and analysing the extensive factual information I have been able to gather.’

A huge sigh of relief coming from the direction of Downing Street, no doubt; but the PM hasn’t been entirely let off even with the slim-line, 12-page version of the report that appeared today. The paragraphs highlighting the ‘failures of leadership and judgement’ that are ‘difficult to justify’ may not name names, but it hardly even seems necessary. Of the 16 ‘events’ Gray has studied, booze looms large as the drinking culture that seems to be endemic at No.10 falls under the spotlight. ‘The excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace at any time,’ writes Gray. History tells us past PMs such as Churchill and Harold Wilson often found solace in a decanter to relieve the stress of the difficult times they governed in, but a quiet after-hours soak in spirits at the end of the working day is a far cry from a pissed-up Downing Street bearing more of a resemblance to a Bullingdon Club pub crawl than the heart of Government. And this at a time when the country beyond No.10’s hedonistic bubble was experiencing extreme personal privations imposed upon it by the same people gleefully ignoring them.

Last month, Boris denied during PMQ’s that a party had been held in Downing Street on 13 November 2020; if the Gray report seems set to contradict this denial, the PM could be accused of misleading Parliament, an offence that might be expected to be accompanied with a resignation. But don’t hold your breath just yet. The Commons having its first opportunity to react to this ‘sample’ version of the Gray report was bound to produce a hostile environment for Boris, with the predictable calls for him to quit emanating from opposition parties. Tory backbenchers have not refrained from joining in, however. Noted anti-Project Fear Conservative MP Steve Baker spoke of the propaganda campaign’s effect on the public, ‘to bully, to shame and to terrify them into compliance’, and there’s also a fair bit of head shaking when it comes to the decision to hold a couple of parties at No.10 the night before the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh; regardless of one’s opinion of old Philip, the staggering lack of sensitivity as the sovereign prepared to bury her husband is breathtaking.

As ever where shaky ground stood on by Tory Prime Ministers is concerned, a good deal rests with the response of the 1922 Committee and the 54 complaints against the occupant of No.10 that are required to trigger a leadership contest. We haven’t reached that stage yet, and the convenient intervention of the Met with regards to the full, unexpurgated incarnation of the Sue Gray report means Boris can momentarily deflect questions by announcing there will be no complete Government response to questions on the subject until the police investigation is itself complete – and that’ll hardly be this week. In the Commons today, the PM was able to quote from the current version of the report to support his stance: ‘No conclusions should be drawn or inferences made from this other than it is now for the police to consider the relevant material in relation to those incidents.’ Boris added that ‘it isn’t enough to say sorry’. No, it isn’t; yet, what might be deemed enough by those locked out of the Downing Street shindigs doesn’t appear likely at the moment – though we shall see.

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