Politics: gone but not just yet

By Richard North - April 18, 2022

Try as he might, Johnson has been unable to make “partygate” go away. The Sunday Times (paywall) kicked off over the weekend with a long story about it on its inside pages, but the thrust of the report has since been promoted to the lead in today’s Times, with the front-page headline reading: “Defiant PM insists he didn’t break Covid rules”.

The story has also been copied out in the Telegraph and the Guardian, while even the Financial Times has pitched in with a story headed: “Johnson accused of demeaning his office after new partygate claims”.

Speaking personally, I would suggest that Johnson demeans the office just be being in it, but some may think I’m a little biased on matters concerning the prime minister.

Anyhow, the issue of the moment is the event on 13 November 2020, to mark the exit of Lee Cain, the No 10 director of communications, for which Johnson is expected to be fined by the Met, possibly some time this week.

What marks this out is that “insiders” are breaking their silences and beginning to spill the beans, with one source cited by the Sunday Times claiming that this particular party was instigated by Johnson himself.

“This wasn’t a leaving drinks”, says the source – until the prime minister arrived. “This was the usual press office Friday evening wash-up drinks. Boris came fumbling over, red box in tow, and he gathered the staff around the press office table, which did have bottles of alcohol on it”.

According to this narrative, Johnson said he wanted to say a few words for Lee and started pouring drinks for people and drinking himself. He toasted him. A photographer is said to have been present throughout and is thought to have captured pictures of Johnson. These are said to be damning.

This account, we are told, has been confirmed to the Guardian by a source familiar with what happened. Nobody had organised a leaving do in advance – although it was usual at the time for staff in the press office to drink on Friday evenings – but apparently when Johnson encouraged people to join in, staff felt obliged to partake.

After this event, Johnson is said to have returned to his flat above No 11, where a second gathering involving his wife and her friends is alleged to have taken place that evening. Members of the press team downstairs are said to have heard Abba music blaring from the flat.

It is Johnson’s presence at the earlier event, though, which is thought to be particularly problematic for prime minister because it places him front and centre of a social event in No 10.

Worse still, critics argue that it is impossible to reconcile Johnson’s presence at the event and his drinking with staff with his statements in the House of Commons.

“It’s evidence that he didn’t accidentally mislead the House, he deliberately misled the House”, one insider tells the Sunday Times: “The PM was drinking himself and attending the Friday night wash-up drinks, something he said he never knew existed”.

Johnson’s more immediate problem is a fractious House of Commons, where demands are emerging for a debate about whether he lied to parliament when he told MPs repeatedly that parties did not take place at No 10 and that Covid rules were followed at all time.

Opposition parties have been discussing tactics on how to force a vote, one possibility being to table a motion citing Johnson for being in contempt of parliament. In the unlikely event that this motion was approved, we could see the remarkable circumstance, where the prime minister was banned from entering the Commons.

Even if this remains a theoretical possibility, he still faces some sharp questioning as his elaborately spun narrative continues to unravel. Already he is planning on addressing the Commons on Tuesday after MPs return from their Easter break. As it will be his first appearance after his “birthday party” fine, he is expected to issue a fresh apology for what he still claims was an inadvertent breach of the rules.

But his attempts to downplay the event as spontaneous and informal, the Sunday Times tells us, have been undermined by the fact that the Met has obtained messages, sent by Carrie Johnson several days beforehand, in which she requested that senior officials in No 10 gather staff together. No 10s depiction of the event, has never aligned with reality, says a source.

Investigators also appear to have obtained pictures taken by Johnson’s official photographer, showing him drinking a can of Estrella beer and Sunak a soft drink. And what concerns allies of Johnson is that this event was deemed to be the least problematic of those he attended.

Several photographs emerged during the Sue Gray inquiry, but insiders believe the worst are yet to surface. One picture, as yet unpublished, has people around the table, with “loads of alcohol”. Says a source: “If you put that picture on the front pages, I think a lot of people, MPs, who have priced a lot of stuff in will not have priced that in, because it looks like a massive piss-up”.

Pictures, according to the Telegraph, are causing real problems. Under its front-page headline, which has: “Boris Johnson accused of ‘instigating’ Downing Street lockdown party”, the photographer reportedly captured images of Johnson at the Cain bash, “who allegedly delivered a speech, poured drinks for people and was drinking himself”.

This has the Mirror splashing a front-page headline proclaiming: “Johnson led the boozy party”, with the accusation that Covid rules were broken.

As before, though, Johnson will be attempting on Tuesday to get himself off that hook by playing the Ukraine card, on the one hand calling on MPs to retain a sense of perspective and, on the other, to “move on”. But what seems set to come to his rescue is the inertia of Tory MPs who are fearful of making things worse at the coming local elections.

Says a former cabinet minister cited by the Sunday Times, “No one wants to rock the boat now. It will only punish our friends and colleagues in our constituencies who are running to be local councillors”. But, he adds: “if there are more fines for the PM, the local elections go badly and the Sue Gray report is as damning as I think it will be, then there will be more than enough letters submitted to trigger a no confidence vote”.

A second MP cited by the newspaper says: “You’ve got a drip feed of headlines coming over the horizon. The finale will be 5 May. If the election results are poor, then he should put himself forward for a vote of confidence and we then have the opportunity to either back him or the obviously challenging road of selecting a new leader”.

While this actually seems a remote possibility, though, we do seem to be seeing a change in sentiment. MPs, we are told, are beginning to form a consensus that Johnson cannot lead the party into the next general election – which could be as early as next year.

Here, the Sunday Times obligingly cites a former cabinet minister, who says: “Increasingly MPs are posing two separate questions. Do we want a leadership election now? The answer is a resounding no. Is this the guy that is the automatic choice for us at the next election? Well, no”.

In the view of this former minister, the two questions are increasingly being separated. He believes that, once we get past the horror of Ukraine and it gets down to a stable, albeit depressing pattern, there will come a moment in the summer when people say “enough already, we’re throwing the chances of an election win down the drain and we need to get rid of him”.

The paper suggests that, although Johnson has proved adept at overcoming obstacles that would have brought down any of his predecessors, the question for every Tory MP is whether the hurdle standing in front of him is too high even for him to clear.

Thus, for all his Teflon attributes, it seems we may at last be seeing the end of this man as he acquires the status of “gone but not just yet”.