The greased piglet was wriggling and squirming last week and for a moment it looked as if Boris Johnson’s goose was cooked, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor.
As the Metropolitan Police prepared to serve not one but a whole succession of fines on the Prime Minister, his wife Carrie, his civil servants and no doubt his dog Dilyn, it looked for the first time in the partygate scandal as if Boris Johnson might actually fall. Or be pushed like the Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, who was forced from office last week by a no-confidence vote.
We’ve never seen anything like it. A criminal in Number 10. The lawmakers have become lawbreakers. Sir Keir Starmer’s indignometer was turned up to 11. Liar, liar, pants on fire! Remainers on Twitter were celebrating like it was VE Day.
But then Easter happened, the Moskva sank, and Priti Patel announced that asylum seekers were being sent at extravagant expense to Rwanda. In the fog of fury from human rights lawyers, the piglet, as David Cameron once described Johnson, escaped leaving a trail of sleaze and a faint whiff of Prosecco.
Boris Johnson was never going to resign over partygate. He was censured by the Supreme Court two years ago for unlawfully suspending Parliament during Brexit and that hardly make him blink.
No shame
He has the thickest skin in politics and is almost impossible to shame. He would have had to lose a vote of no confidence in the Commons. But with Boris Johnson earning plaudits for his support for Ukraine, Tory MPs lost their stomach for rebellion. The 54 who would have had to submit letters to the 1922 Committee were nowhere to be found.
The Prime Minister would anyway almost certainly have won a confidence motion. For many Tories, it would have felt like voting against Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself.
Had there been an alternative, a leader in waiting, things might have been different. But there isn’t. Johnson’s main rival Rishi Sunak was also fined for attending a party. This, even though he doesn’t drink, wasn’t invited to any party, and was in Number 10 for a legitimate reason.
The fact that hectic commentators were speculating about Theresa May returning as a caretaker leader told you all you need to know. Not so much a caretaker as an undertaker.
Indeed, the worst casualty of partygate may turn out to be Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader. He looked ridiculous out campaigning last week trailing the former Scottish Tory leader Baroness Davidson, who was positively howling for Johnson’s head. Mr Ross had also called for Johnson to resign earlier this year – and then changed his mind. Now he is out campaigning in the local elections for the most unpopular Prime Minister in Scotland since Margaret Thatcher. It would be no surprise if Ross stands down before Boris.
Met is no moral authority
I AM genuinely torn myself over whether Mr Johnson should have resigned last week. I understand the fury of people who tried to follow the laws of the land only to find that those at the top were breaking them.
However I am not sure I want the Metropolitan Police to be deciding who is Prime Minister. Their conduct has been scandalously inept.
Initially, the Metropolitan Commissioner Cressida Dick said the police had no intention of investigating allegations of parties two years ago. Allegations which had mostly come, it appeared, from the PM’s disgraced former adviser Dominic Cummings. Then Ms Dick resigned and the police embarked on a clunking and bureaucratic investigation of the entire staff of Number 10, and also the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The police evidently rejected the defence that the partygoers were at work when they had their drinks. That they were in their “bubble” and within the rules.
They also dismissed the PM’s defence that he was in his own home when he was ambushed by Carrie armed with a loaded birthday cake.
These seemed to me reasonable defences, especially in the case of Rishi Sunak. The civil servant who actually drafted the lockdown rules, the director of the Covid 19 Task Force, Kate Josephs, thought so too. She has now been been duly fined for breaching her own laws. The former director of propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office, Helen MacNamara, has also been fined for attending a gathering she thought was ethical. Partygate has turned into a Whitehall farce.
The police applied a very narrow interpretation of the law which should probably have been contested in court though none of the accused had the stomach.
A resignation matter?
THIS is not a party political point. I would have said the same had it been Tony Blair in a similar situation, which he was over the cash-for-honours scandal.
Nor would I have expected Nicola Sturgeon to resign last year after she was photographed speaking at a funeral reception without a mask on. Or Sir Keir himself who was photographed drinking beer during a political meeting last year.
The point about fixed penalty notices is that they do not lead to a criminal conviction unless they are contested. They are summary fines. This is not my view but that of the former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald who told the BBC in January that FPNs are “like parking tickets”.
The lockdown laws were a mess. There was no clear definition of what an illegal gathering was and how it differed from a legitimate work meeting. It led to pensioners being fined for comforting neighbours. Relatives being prevented from comforting the dying. Scotland’s legal requirement to wear face coverings in most indoor public spaces and on public transport becomes guidance from tomorrow. But prior to this, you could still be prosecuted for not wearing a mask but not for the possession of a Class A drug. The criminal law was too blunt an instrument to enforce pandemic protocols which the British people were spontaneously adopting anyway.
Of course it was the all the Prime Minister’s men and women who made these laws and so it is fitting that they pay the penalty for them. They deserve everything they get for imposing rules on the rest of us that they did not believe in themselves. But it would set an equally absurd precedent for a prime minister, even one as dodgy as Boris Johnson, to resign over a fistful of parking offences. It is the voters who should decide his fate.
The May local elections will be the moment when voters get their chance to punish Johnson and his party people.
And they surely will. Some say this is regrettable because local elections are important and should be about local issues. But democracy is about whatever the voters say it is.
After the May 6. drubbing, Tory MPs will have to decide whether they keep this shop-soiled leader in place until the next General Election in 2024. A hard decision, certainly, but not a forgone conclusion. Who could take over? Not Priti Patel, for certain.
Her decision to send asylum seekers to Rwanda in the hope they get lost there was another cack-handed stunt by our inhumane Home Office. As if obstructing Ukrainian refugees wasn’t enough.
Boris Johnson should be ashamed of putting his name to this unworkable scheme. Rwandagate is a far more credible resignation issue than partygate ever was.
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