FROM his less-than-splendid Covid self-isolation deep in the Downing St bunker, Boris will have had another sleepless night, pondering what the next day’s papers will bring, particularly on a headline-heavy Sunday.
The worst thing for any leading politician is not just constant criticism but ridicule. Anyone scanning social media will have noticed how the PM has become a running joke. His biggest worry now is: resignations, particularly among Cabinet colleagues. Just one could be enough to begin a landslide.
Telephone lines have been sizzling over the weekend as top Tories consult one another amid the deluge of anger from constituents cascading into their inboxes.
One former minister described Boris as “toast” while another MP said the PM’s situation looked “terminal”. Tellingly perhaps, one minister aired his exasperation publicly.
Guy Opperman denounced his boss’s behaviour as “unacceptable,” recalling how in the same month when Number 10 staffers were partying, he was distraught, unable to support his newborn twin sons before they died. Watch this space.
Earlier this week, Liz Truss told people it was now time to “move on” from partygate. Dream on, Foreign Secretary.
Her Cabinet colleague Michael Gove predicted a Government shake-up was likely following the Gray report but didn’t feel Johnson’s resignation should be part of it. Indeed, there are suggestions Boris is planning a Downing St overhaul, which would include the departure of top civil servants. How, I wonder, would the public view that?
Meantime, there is talk Johnson has sought the counsel of an old friend, the Wizard of Oz, Lynton Crosby, the blunt-speaking strategist, who helped him get elected as Mayor of London.
The PM will be hoping to divert the nation’s attention back onto the pandemic with a move to lift England’s Plan B measures, such as the guidance to work from home, which are due to expire on January 26. But will there be time?
As I tap there are only five Conservative MPs, including Douglas Ross, who have publicly called for Johnson to go. However, the weekend ear-bending by constituents could lead to a raft of others tomorrow handing in their no-confidence letters to the party’s 1922 committee.
The men in grey suits will have to calculate the best way forward if the magic number of 54 signatories, triggering a contest, threatens to be reached.
They may want to stay their hand and allow Boris to continue and take the flak from the Gray report, face the deluge of criticism from rising taxes and prices in the spring and suffer the humiliation of a political drubbing in the May 5 elections.
This would avoid a successor having to suffer such a cataract of calamities and emerge to attempt a fresh start over summer.
Yet this may be far too overly optimistic. Those famous “events” might disrupt such a strategy.
Firstly, we don’t know what Sue Gray, the Whitehall bloodhound, will sniff out in her ever-expanding inquiry. At the last count, there were 15 social events across Whitehall to investigate, most in Number 10.
“Completely blindsided” by the latest revelations, she is now concerned staffers are withholding information, leading some to fear her report will simply be a whitewash.
Secondly, the new revelations about parties in Downing St last April could bring in PC Plod.
Unlike the May 2020 soiree, which, the PM insisted was “technically” within the legal regulations, the parties in April 2021 took place when there was a strict ban on any indoor gatherings of more than two people from different households.
If Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, orders an inquiry, then that would send partygate into a different dimension; some lawyers are seriously questioning why, given the evidence already exists, she is waiting.
Boris might desperately try to cling onto the Downing St furniture but, in such circumstances, with the possibility of criminal charges hanging over people, the grey suits will have no option but, metaphorically speaking, to hand him the revolver and glass of whisky.
As if things couldn’t get worse for our beleaguered premier this week, they did. Much worse. The head of state no less was dragged into the controversy, forcing Downing St into another abject apology.
The two No 10 drinks parties in April last year involved groups of staffers. A suitcase was apparently used to bring back the booze from a Co-op store off Trafalgar Square. A suitcase!
Civil servants partied into the wee small hours on the very day the Queen was burying her late husband. It meant newsdesks across the land could reuse the tragic picture of the masked monarch seated in Windsor Castle chapel all alone in funereal black; like so many others, uncomforted by her family. Because, of course, she was obeying the rules the Downing Street revellers decided didn’t apply to them. The contrast couldn’t have been starker.
Then came two more you-couldn’t-make-it-up moments.
Kate Josephs, ex-head of the Government’s Covid taskforce, who created the restrictions, apologised for having broken them herself with a leaving drinks-do during lockdown. She said she was “truly sorry”.
It emerged Number 10 staff had bought a fridge to keep their bottles of booze in as they enjoyed regular “wine-time Friday” gatherings while coronavirus restrictions were in place.
It seems clear Boris sanctioned, as one Downing St insider described it, a “culture of boozing”.
Politically, Tory MPs must by now realise that Johnson is trashing the Conservative brand in the eyes of many voters, who hitherto have supported it. Certainly in Scotland, Tory politicians know the PM is an electoral liability; their counterparts in England are painfully learning the same lesson.
A poll has put his net favourability rating across the UK at its lowest: -52; in Scotland it’s - 77. One poll put Labour 10 points clear.
The cumulative nature of partygate has the feel of a fatalistic drumbeat towards political oblivion. Given the scale of public opprobrium and the damage to the Conservative brand, Boris’s departure from office now seems just a question of time. The Downing St lectern awaits.
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