On 19 December last year Boris Johnson appeared in Downing Street to tell the nation more bad news about Covid-19 that would affect the plans of millions of people at Christmas. “Yesterday afternoon I was briefed on the latest data showing the virus spreading more rapidly in London and the south-east of England than would be expected,” he said.
Reading from a script that, a year on, seems depressingly familiar, he said a new strain of Covid-19 (which would become known as the Alpha variant) was taking hold and was thought to be up to 70% more transmissible than the old one.
“We know enough already to be sure we must act now,” Johnson told the country. So grave was the situation that the PM had convened an urgent meeting of ministers on the Covid operations committee the previous evening to discuss the need for tough and deeply unwelcome new restrictions, including rules that would mean people in tier 4 areas could not mix with anyone outside their household – even on Christmas Day.
On that same Friday evening when Johnson and his ministers met, however, the last thing on the minds of some members of his staff at Downing Street – and a favoured few across Whitehall departments – was a new variant or fresh Covid rules. Instead they were getting ready for some festive fun behind the big black door of No 10.
In an area of Downing Street occupied by advisers and his press team, through which Johnson and his wife, Carrie, have to pass to get to their flat at the top of the building, several dozen officials gathered over the course of that evening for drinks, nibbles and party games at the end of another long week.
It appears to have been a blatant breach of rules by people whose day job was to communicate the need for compliance to the nation. But this was the heart of power. “Most of them in there had had Covid. They had been ill. They thought somehow things didn’t apply to them,” said a senior government source.
“I think they were just rather blasé. They called it the plague pit in there because it had ripped through the building. So they thought, well, we have been bloodied by it. What more can happen to us? But it was fucking stupid. It shows the arrogance. Put it out there with an invitation, and you are demarcating it as an event, for God’s sake.”
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When news of this and other alleged Downing Street “parties” first broke in the media at the end of November, the prime minister and his staff denied any wrongdoing. Johnson insisted that he had known nothing at the time and had been assured since that if a small get-together had happened, it had been fully compliant with rules in place at the time. There was nothing to worry about.
But this weekend, when Johnson should be happily celebrating the birth on Thursday morning of his seventh child, a baby daughter, while preoccupying himself on the work front with a new emerging Covid crisis, the issue of “partygate” has blown up in his face and is consuming many in Downing Street.
This, and other self-inflicted crises that call into question not just the prime minister’s judgment but his honesty and integrity, have coincided and fed off each other in a way that even some ministers sense now threatens his premiership, not least because, as one former minister put it: “We are talking about this bollocks instead of what matters, and it is happening again, again and again”.
This weekend large sections of the Tory party are in total despair. Only a month ago it was the Owen Paterson affair, a catastrophic prime ministerial misjudgment which triggered weeks of Tory sleaze stories. It is the regularity of these disasters that incredibly has led some Conservative MPs to think, for the first time, about scenarios under which the man who won them an 80-strong majority two years ago might have to be thrown overboard.
And all as yet another Covid variant, Omicron, surges across the UK, requiring public compliance and patience with another round of government restrictions at Christmas.
To add to Johnson’s woes, a giant Tory rebellion looms over his latest package of Covid restrictions, due to be voted on in the Commons on Tuesday. “It is a total farce and a total disaster,” said one senior Tory MP. “How can we have authority as a party of government when the public see this hypocrisy going on? The party thing has really angered everyone and the timing is beyond awful. It is worse than Barnard Castle with my constituents. The next few days will be critical.”
Wednesday was a truly terrible day for Boris Johnson, one of those when it seemed things simply could not get any worse for the PM. The evening before, ITV News had broadcast leaked footage in which Downing Street staff, including Allegra Stratton, the PM’s official spokesperson at the time, laughed about the hitherto flatly denied Christmas party, four days after it had clearly happened.
Officials had been rehearsing with Stratton for planned broadcast press conferences (which then never happened because everyone concluded the idea would backfire) and wanted to see how she would react and what she would say if journalists ever found out.
Ed Oldfield, who still works at No 10 as an adviser on broadcast media matters, was posing as a journalist and said he had heard that a Christmas party had taken place. What was the government response? Stratton was flummoxed, and laughed nervously before asking, “What’s the answer?” To guffaws in the room, she then offered that “this fictional party was a business meeting … and it was not socially distanced”. It was clear to the millions who saw the footage that the often denied event had most definitely taken place – and that everyone who knew about it feared that one day it would leak out.
At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Johnson offered a grovelling, excruciating apology for the video and the way his staff had behaved. It was another hugely damaging U-turn. He said he was “appalled and sickened”, though he did not actually admit that the party had happened. That, he insisted, would be for the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, to establish in a new inquiry. Case would within hours widen that inquiry to include allegations about other parties, including one in Johnson’s own flat a year or so ago.
Unlike at PMQs two weeks before, when many seats were left vacant as Tory MPs stayed away out of disgust at the Paterson disaster, this time they were packed in behind Johnson. But not to cheer him on. Rather, they looked on in deathly silence at the macabre events as Keir Starmer twisted the knife. The prime minister tried to inject some Covid vaccine bounce back into his backbenchers, talking about the government’s record on boosters, but the old tricks were falling flat. He was on his own amid a sea of morose faces.
The reasons were more than just about the party. Before MPs had entered the chamber, strong rumours had been circulating that Johnson and his cabinet were about to do what they had suggested would not be necessary before Christmas, and order their Covid “plan B” to be implemented, meaning a return to tighter restrictions with vaccine passports in nightclubs, more mask-wearing and other new rules. And this as the row about non-compliance among Downing Street staff raged on.
So cynical had even his own MPs become that the automatic suspicion of some was that new rules were an attempt to divert attention away from “partygate”. Tory MP William Wragg stood up and said as much: “Very few will be convinced by this diversionary tactic,” he told his leader, in an intervention that drew gasps from all sides.
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Outside the chamber, Tory MPs were in a state of open despair. One Johnson loyalist said he thought the PM could still rescue the situation, but added quickly that if he didn’t by early in the new year the party would show its ruthless streak. “Unlike Labour, we are good at getting rid of liabilities. If this goes on, we act.” What angered many was the backlash they were already feeling from their constituents. “The film about the party did it. That filled up my inbox overnight. Worse than anything I have had before. That was the trigger,” said a former minister.
Something else had changed, almost overnight. Normally unexcitable Tory backbenchers were beginning to discuss life after Johnson and mull possible successors. Several talked about Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, being “on manoeuvres”, and Jeremy Hunt never having closed down his failed 2019 leadership bid.
Some admitted writing, if not sending, letters of no confidence to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, as they toyed with attempting to trigger a leadership contest.
“It’s not dated, but it’s sitting on my desk,” said one MP. It was the depressing cycle of crisis after crisis that had led him to put pen to paper. Were other letters being written? “I think the answer to that is undoubtedly yes. Whether it gets to the trigger figure this side of the new year, I’m not sure. But it’s end of empire stuff.”
Several MPs said that Johnson’s weakness was all the greater because he lacked any die-in-the-ditch allies. “He has nobody who will stand for the last bit of hand-to-hand combat. He’s on the field alone. The emperor doesn’t have new clothes. He is just wandering around stark bollock naked,” observed another MP.
“I’ve got members, my colleagues are saying they’ve got members, saying, ‘I voted for Johnson as I thought he was brilliant. I was duped. He’s a clown. He’s got to go.’”
In midweek, Downing Street tried to get senior ministers on radio and TV to defend Johnson, but they all found excuses not to do so.
Later on Wednesday afternoon, a tearful Stratton appeared outside her London home and announced her resignation, which Johnson accepted, presumably hoping that would at least restore some calm.
But the next day – after Johnson had spent the night at a London hospital as his wife gave birth – the PM was having to deal with new and potentially even more serious issues about the way the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat had been paid for, at a cost of more than £100,000.
The Electoral Commission ruled in a report that the Tory party had broken electoral law by failing to declare money given by Tory donor Lord Brownlow as a donation. The commission also mentioned a WhatsApp message that Johnson sent to Brownlow asking for money, months before Johnson said he first dealt with the peer on the matter. Johnson’s adviser on ministerial interests, Lord Geidt, who had investigated the refurbishment and cleared Johnson of wrongdoing was said to be furious and to have considered quitting. If he still does so, he will be the second standards chief under Johnson to have resigned because of the PM’s own behaviour.
The adviser on parliamentary standards, Kathryn Stone, is now said to be considering launching her own investigation into the issue. “If Geidt goes I think that could be very serious indeed,” said a former cabinet minister on Saturday. Another well-placed MP said it was not impossible that Johnson, like Paterson, could be recommended for suspension from the Commons.
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This coming week will, most MPs believe, be a critical one for Johnson. On Tuesday, several dozen Tory MPs are threatening to rebel over the new Covid restrictions. Many believe the case has not been made that the Omicron variant requires such intervention, when there is scientific evidence to suggest that it only causes relatively mild disease. They also want Johnson to show that he meant it when he said the country needs to live with Covid-19. “It is a basic issue of principle,” one rebel said. “It’s about civil liberties.”
Then on Thursday, voters go to the polls in what should be the safest of safe Tory seats in a byelection in North Shropshire caused by the resignation of Paterson, whose case started the whole downward spiral for Johnson. Sensing an unlikely electoral scalp, the Liberal Democrats have been flooding the constituency and were on course to have a record number of activists there this weekend.
The party has made 37,000 “contact attempts” with constituency voters. A memo to staff from its chief executive on Friday revealed that, according to responses it had reviewed from voters who said they would cast a ballot on Thursday, the Tories – who enjoyed a 23,000 majority at the last election – now had a one-point poll lead. The Lib Dem projection puts the Tories on 40%, the Lib Dems on 39% and Labour on 12%, with Reform UK and the Greens on 4% each.
As our Opinium poll shows today, support for Johnson is fast ebbing away. In just a few weeks, a comfortable Tory advantage has turned into a nine-point lead for Labour. One senior Tory MP said that in the current atmosphere he would not be surprised if his party lost. “Boris will be praying that we hang on, so he can get through to Christmas and then regroup. But there is a lot of anger out there. We thought he was an electoral asset. But this is the worst possible time for the Tory party led by Boris to be asking the electorate to keep the faith.”
