LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine): There are demands for the police to bypass the civil service investigation when more lockdown gatherings are discovered.
During the lockdown in late March 2020, and members of parliament had gone to their seats for an early Easter holiday, then-business minister Nadhim Zahawi laid out the ground rules for businesses across the country to combat the pandemic.
He asked them to avoid unnecessary mixing to help minimise the spread of disease. In a written legislative response, he said, “Workers should try to minimise all meetings and gatherings in the workplace.”
There were a minimum of 14 parties, leaving quizzes, dos, and meetings-with-drinks at Downing Street and other Whitehall offices between Boris Johnson’s national lockdown announcement on March 23, 2020, and April last year.
Last Monday, a former head of the civil service, Lord Kerslake, remarked that it had been a ‘party on’ and nobody bothered to say ‘don’t do this. It simply grew worse and more after it started. There was a moral apathy present.
“It’s appallingly undisciplined, irresponsible, and tone-deaf behaviour that showed a complete lack of empathy for the way in which the country was having to suffer at the time,” he added.
Last week, it was claimed that a reveller smashed a child’s swing belonging to Wilf Johnson, the prime minister’s son, after one of the celebrations in May overflowed onto the yard late at night. A bag was allegedly used for a grocery run to load up on alcohol on at least one occasion, and a £142 drinks fridge was placed in the ground-floor press office for “wine-time Fridays.”
The “partygate” incident is contending for the title of Johnson’s worst political blunder. Sue Gray, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ second permanent secretary, who previously served as the Cabinet Office’s head of ethics and propriety for six years, has the onerous duty of unpicking it.
Her reputation is one of fairness, independence, and toughness, but there is a growing belief that her investigation is no longer relevant for purpose.
Kerslake said that when the inquiry began, it was about one event, and the prime minister’s involvement was unknown. Now it’s known that there had been over a dozen events, not only was the prime minister involved, but he was also in the thick of it.
