Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Gups]

I actually think this might be the end of Boris if he can't plausibly deny attending

This is exactly how you end up with a clown like Boris as prime minister.

People get pushed out or put into office on clown criteria and you get clowns in the role. Not only were the rules dumb to begin with - and lots of people didn't follow them - but he had covid early on. He had some immunity.

Boris is pretty much the only cperson I can think of who has combined the clown/PM role. Theresa May and Gordon Brown may have been poor PMS but they certainly weren't clowns.

Pretty much everyone was following the rules at the time (this was  fairly early days in the Pandemic).

So what if he had immunity. This was 100 people invited to a party in his own back garden at a time when he was repeatedly telling everyone else that they could only mix with one person outside their household. Maybe the rules were dumb (that's a different debate) but he made the rules and made it a criminal offence to break them.

[Gups]

What is ironic in the whole thing is he actually tried at the start to be selfless and set an example by taking to heart the advice of public health officials (who for whatever stupid reason are considered to represent "science") and shook the hands of covid patients, and the result was he nearly died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3NAx3tsy-k

Shaking hands with covid patients while an obese middle aged dude? Really dumb and a terrible example for everyone.

Going to an outdoor dinner party after recovering from covid and having solid immunity? And then getting vaccinated at the first opportunity? Not a bad set of decisions.

I'd like to see a link demonstrating that public health officials advised him or anyone else to shake the hands of covid patients.

[Tamas]

It's DRussel, man, just let him be.

[Sheilbh]

The current line is that Johnson can't confirm if he attended this party and we have to wait for the internal civil service investigation to tell him he attended the party or not.

Ruth Davidson (former, successful, Scottish Tory leader) comes across pretty angry about this:

Ruth Davidson
@RuthDavidsonPC
This line won't survive 48 hrs. Nobody needs an official to tell them if they were at a boozy shindig in their own garden. People are (rightly) furious. They sacrificed so much - visiting sick or grieving relatives, funerals. What tf were any of these people thinking?

Others are pointing out that the email came from Johnson's Principal Private Secretary (Bernard in Yes Minister) so wouldn't have been sent if the boss didn't know. It's really not sustainable to keep punting this until Sue Gray does her report.

Edit: Also the clip from breakfast TV this morning is pretty brutal (also striking that the person doing the interview is a pretty junior minister who I'd never heard of):
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1480829796749819904?s=20

[garbon]

The current line is that Johnson can't confirm if he attended this party and we have to wait for the internal civil service investigation to tell him he attended the party or not.

Ruth Davidson (former, successful, Scottish Tory leader) comes across pretty angry about this:

Ruth Davidson
@RuthDavidsonPC
This line won't survive 48 hrs. Nobody needs an official to tell them if they were at a boozy shindig in their own garden. People are (rightly) furious. They sacrificed so much - visiting sick or grieving relatives, funerals. What tf were any of these people thinking?

Others are pointing out that the email came from Johnson's Principal Private Secretary (Bernard in Yes Minister) so wouldn't have been sent if the boss didn't know. It's really not sustainable to keep punting this until Sue Gray does her report.

Edit: Also the clip from breakfast TV this morning is pretty brutal (also striking that the person doing the interview is a pretty junior minister who I'd never heard of):
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1480829796749819904?s=20

Total farce

[Richard Hakluyt]

Must have drunk a hell of a lot not to know whether he was at the party or not 

[Sheilbh]

Labour have an urgent question on this in an hour. Again the government response will be from someone pretty junior - Michael Ellis (again not heard of him) who is not in the cabinet.

As with the breakfast TV I think it probably means two things - one is that no-one in the cabinet wants to be associated with defending this and that they probably don't trust what Johnson would tell them and don't want to be caught in his lie.

[Gups]

Boris, one month ago - in Parliament:

"I understand and share the anger up and down the country at seeing No 10 staff seeming to make light of lockdown measures, and I can understand how infuriating it must be to think that people who have been setting the rules have not been following the rules because I was also furious to see that clip. I apologise unreservedly for the offence that it has caused up and down the country and I apologise for the impression that it gives.But I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no Covid rules were broken, and that is what I have been repeatedly assured."

[Tamas]

Must have drunk a hell of a lot not to know whether he was at the party or not 

TBF this is probably one of several garden lockdown booze sessions so dates and such must be pretty blurry.

[Tamas]

Good summary opinion piece:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/britain-boris-johnson-lockdown-gathering-public

As a lot of people in Boris Johnson's life have discovered, there is a point where he has simply broken too many things for the relationship to be put functionally back together again. Is he at that point with the British public, or even with the Conservative party?

Many are getting a really addled whiff of Humpty Dumpty off the latest revelations, that the prime minister himself attended a "mass gathering" in the Downing Street garden during the first lockdown. This May 2020 BYOB drinks party, to which more than 100 people were invited, kicked off a mere 55 minutes after that day's designated cabinet minister had given a national press conference insisting that people in England could only meet one person from another household outdoors, so ... what was the party theme? Let them eat cheese and wine? Come as the last scene in Animal Farm?

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Spellbindingly, Johnson yesterday refused to even admit he'd been at the drinks party, his smile twitching and his eyes swivelling as he cowered in some vaccination centre and gibbered: "All that, as you know, is the subject of a proper investigation by Sue Gray." Had he been interviewed by Sue Gray? "All that is a subject for investigation by Sue Gray."

I'm afraid the only sane response to this is: what?! What are you even talking about? Did you or didn't you go to a big party in your garden, you smirking fibreglass toby jug? Or do you also have to wait for some veteran civil servant to tell you whether or not you put your pants on the right way round this morning? Honestly mate, just MAN UP. Johnson's turn as "prime minister" seems to have moved past the sarcastic air quotes phase. This feels a lot like government by the crazy-face emoji, tongue lolling out and one eye boggling bigger than the other. Any Tory MP who voted for this galaxy-class liar to become leader should remember they were wrong on probably the biggest call of their career, and consider resigning before the next election to go and work for a charity/arms dealer.

Speaking of manning up, I wonder if the organisers managed to find any ladies to attend this 20 May party? I mean, I'm not saying that people who do well under Johnson are mainly guys who spent a significant part of the past decade masturbating to Game of Thrones. No wait – I am. But one of my favourite things about the one Downing Street cheese-and-wine "work meeting" that we have an actual photo of is that the only two women I can see in it are Carrie Johnson and Gina Coladangelo. Remember, girls: if you want to work at the heart of government, you need to be either a man, or in a relationship with a man who does. If you can dream it, you can do it!

Back to the BYOB party, though – sorry, I know you need flashcards to keep your rule-breaking Downing Street pandemic bashes in order – which was organised by Johnson's principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds. Apparently Reynolds now wants to get back to the diplomatic service, and perhaps the Middle East, and there is some talk about him being made an ambassador. You know, like when you or I break the rules and mess up spectacularly at work, and they make us an ambassador.

Two days after the May BYOB party, the story of Dominic Cummings' rule-breaking trips to Durham and Barnard Castle broke, which you'd think would have given these people a lifelong unforgettable lesson in just how incandescent the public were about elite rule-breaking. (And yet, given all the Downing Street parties which followed that Christmas, they somehow forgot it.) But in May 2020, who could have predicted that a potential 100-person boozy gathering could piss the general public off? Who could have predicted that people who'd watched their family members die on an iPad then buried them with only permitted numbers of mourners at graveside funerals would have an issue with it? No one at the party, apparently. In which case, every single one of them is in the wrong job and should resign and go and work for a thinktank/be our man in Havana.

Incredibly, even the Met are finally "in contact" with the Cabinet Office over the latest party revelation. So do settle down to another episode of this farce, which might be entitled NO RUSH, PLOD. Yet again we have to ask: where were the multiple police officers who were stationed in and around the Downing Street complex when this BYOB party was happening? Did they notice at least 30 people having a booze-up, three hours after their force's official social media account was reminding people of the rules? If not, maybe they could consider their positions/go on the sick for two years then retire at 53 with a full pension.

Smartphones mean most people can check photos to see what they were doing on 20 May that year. I note this party occurred fairly soon after a Met officer told me to stop playing cricket in the park with my children, on the basis that cricket is "sport but not exercise". Admittedly, I don't care to run singles (I see myself as the Chris Gayle of Kensington Gardens), but let's not forget how officious police forces up and down the land were at the time.

What so many hundreds of thousands of us will also never forget, alas, are our own darker stories: graveside funerals; Zoom funerals; funerals after which no gathering was allowed by law. Just weeks before 20 May, a 13-year-old boy had died alone in a London hospital, separated from his family, who were also unable to attend his funeral because they were adhering to isolation regulations. Every single person at the Downing Street party would have known that story.

But I am afraid this goes even further than shame and deceit. It is increasingly unignorable that these serial exposés of No 10 culture are taking place against a backdrop of growing conspiracism in this country. Significant numbers of people turned to online misinformation over the pandemic, and a lot of previously soft conspiracism is now calcifying in deeply concerning ways. More are being sucked down those rabbit holes all the time.

I say sucked; but every one-rule-for-them revelation amounts to a push. After all, when people repeatedly see the duplicity and double standards of those in command, is conspiracism really such an irrational response? The tragedy is that we will all end up paying for the breakdown in trust, both in ways which are already obvious, such as rising anti-vax sentiment, and in ways we cannot yet predict. But they are coming, and Boris Johnson's way of doing business has hastened them. How can we counter some people's conviction that "The Man" is lying to them, when the man is so often shown to be lying?

[Sheilbh]

I wondered if this might all blow over because in a way it's nothing new. That's not the case if anything it seems to have cause even more anger and outrage.

Jim Shannon, a DUP MP, breaks down when recalling his mother-in-law who died alone because of the covid rules:
https://twitter.com/MirrorPolitics/status/1480908879290671110

[alfred russel]

What is ironic in the whole thing is he actually tried at the start to be selfless and set an example by taking to heart the advice of public health officials (who for whatever stupid reason are considered to represent "science") and shook the hands of covid patients, and the result was he nearly died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3NAx3tsy-k

Shaking hands with covid patients while an obese middle aged dude? Really dumb and a terrible example for everyone.

Going to an outdoor dinner party after recovering from covid and having solid immunity? And then getting vaccinated at the first opportunity? Not a bad set of decisions.

I'd like to see a link demonstrating that public health officials advised him or anyone else to shake the hands of covid patients.

The video I posted literally has him at a joint press conference with the health secretary who responded to "wash your hands"! Apparently the day of that press conference was the day the guidance on social distancing was released.

[Sheilbh]

That video's from the 3 March. 16 March is when Johnson said people should stop non-essential contact and travel". 23 March was when he announced lockdown and 26 March was when lockdown came into force.

To add to the Marina Hyde - Alex Massie is pretty strong in the Spectator:

The unfathomable inadequacy of Boris Johnson
How low can the Prime Minister go?
11 January 2022, 11:20am
The unfathomable inadequacy of Boris Johnson

There is no room for wriggling here and not just because multiple witnesses put Boris Johnson and his wife at the scene of the stupidity. If Boris Johnson had not been aware that 100 people who work in the same building as him had been invited to a post-work BYOB shindig, even he might have noticed a crowd of 30 to 40 gathering in his garden. And he might then have popped a prime ministerial head out of the window and asked what the bloody hell the partygoers thought they were doing.

But of course nothing like that happened because the Prime Minister must surely have known about it all along. The invitation, after all, came from his principal private secretary, not some rogue Downing Street employee. But, once again, even if by some heroic act of ignorance the Prime Minister did not know about the party in advance he certainly knew about it when he attended it.

At which point – as at any moment in this saga of intergalactic idiocy – it was within the Prime Minister's power to note the manner in which this gathering contravened his own regulations in a dozen different ways and, you know, shut it down, sending everyone home with a thunderous cry of 'What were you thinking, you fools?'

Instead the Prime Minister and his wife attended the party.

It was apparent long before he entered Downing Street that Boris Johnson would be a pub league prime minister but even his detractors can be forgiven for underestimating the depths of his inadequacy. No prime minister would have sailed through the Covid emergency unchallenged or unscathed but to a man and woman Johnson's predecessors would at least have appreciated you can't have ministers appearing on television reminding people they can't meet friends in the park and then – an hour later! – host a staff jolly in the Downing Street garden.

Whatever one might think of Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major or Margaret Thatcher it is simply impossible to imagine them sanctioning a social event of this sort at a time when, across the country, thousands and thousands of people were prevented from attending the funerals of family members and friends. I am confident every one of those prime ministers would have considered a party in those circumstances grotesquely inappropriate (which is the true standard here, not whatever the law might say). Only this prime minister is different. Only he stands alone. For he is Boris Johnson and restrictions which apply to other people cannot be expected to apply to him.

We do not always ask too much from our political leaders. The bar for acceptability is not so very high: a measure of application, a plausible sense of where they might like to take the country, a sufficient lick of probity and so on. That might not be enough to make a prime minister loved, it is usually sufficient for them to be afforded a grudging measure of respect. Like 'em or not, at least they're doing their best. Not very good, perhaps, but those are the breaks.

No one, however, can say what Boris Johnson's best might look like for it is an alien concept of a kind even a fertile imagination can scarcely contemplate. It is an idea beyond our feeble understanding and must be left to some future civilisation to investigate.

If these were times of sunshine and laughter and easy prosperity the Prime Minister's inadequacies might not matter so very much. His government would still, even in those propitious circumstances, deliver less than it might promise but it would not be a ghastly or shaming blunder. As soon as Covid washed up here, however, it was apparent Johnson was ill-matched for both the office he holds and the time in which he occupies it. Not much has changed in the intervening two years.

So it now falls to the Tory party to do something about this. If the Conservative party had anything about it these days its senior representatives would hand the Prime Minister the black spot. For neither the party, nor the government, nor – and more importantly – the country can go on like this. Nor should it be expected to.

Written byAlex Massie
Alex Massie is Scotland Editor of The Spectator.

[Sheilbh]

And some snap polls have about 55-65% of people think Johnson should resign (including 45% of Tory 2019 voters) which is not great from his perspective

It's going to be very difficult for him to convince Tory MPs that this is just a Westminster bubble story.

Edit: Also I see other MPs are sharing other personal stories from the first lockdown which are pretty bad - just like everyone else I suppose. Afzal Khan, a Labour MP, said he sat in the carpark of a hospital while his mother died inside because it was as close as he could be to her - and then called Johnson a liar (the Speaker said that's "not the language we would use in parliament" but didn't ask Khan to retract it which is the norm).

Separately the PM's official spokesman was asked this morning: "do you want to take this opportunity to respond to all the allegations that the Prime Minister is a liar and lied over parties?"

The spokesman said the PM's addressed these sorts of questions on numerous occasions and they had nothing to add - which is not a great denial.

[Josquius]

Im not sure what's best.
I don't see him surviving till the next election.
So best to be rid of him now so the new leader can't rely on a give him a chance boost or to let him keep trashing the tory reputation.