Lump of coal for Labour but they can still ditch their lame duck leader
Westminster had woken up to the political equivalent of a really lousy Christmas haul. What dreams they had harboured last night! Sugar-plums waltzed with fixed penalty notices in Chris Bryant’s head; candy canes and resignation speeches mingled in the minds of many a mutinous back-bencher.
But as dawn broke, the longed-for remote control car and new sledge hadn’t materialised. Instead they found something closer to a geometry set and a book on church history lurking in their stocking: no more fines for Boris and Carrie after all.
Some MPS remained defiant. “The Prime Minister got a fine... he broke the law and he lied to parliament – he should go!” cried Sir Ed Davey glumly when cornered in Central Lobby by one news team. The Lib Dem leader seemed to be pinning his hopes on the Sue Gray report – “the final missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle” – and demanded its immediate publication.
Westminster hacks also looked suddenly impotent when brought up short by this unexpected full stop. Sky’s Beth Rigby sat down with Helen Ball, acting deputy commissioner of the Met, and fought a long and ultimately fruitless battle to extract an iota of outrage from the exchange.
Rigby asked if the issuing of fines to so many Downing Street officials had undermined public faith in the law.
Given she is no stranger to a contraband knees-up herself, Rigby was perhaps the wrong person to ask this question.
But if Sky were looking for a redblooded denunciation from Scotland Yard, it wasn’t going to come from the deputy commissioner, who made Dame Cressida Dick look like Christopher Biggins. “That’s not for me to comment on,” came the stony-faced reply.
Rigby returned to the fray. “Were you surprised about the level of fixed penalty notices, given that these people did write the laws?” To this, Ball gave another peerless diplomat’s answer: “I think a number of members of the public have been both surprised and concerned by what they’ve heard and I’m sure they’ll be surprised by the outcome of our investigation.”
Undeterred, Rigby fractionally modified the same question “Have you ever done anything like this before, an investigation that has hit so closely on the people that actually make laws?”
Once again she was thwarted by the interviewee who betrayed nothing. “We have carried out various investigations in the past into all sorts of different people,” she replied (not when my phone got nicked, it must be said).
Had everyone been cooperative? Finally came a conclusive answer, if not the one that the press pack had been hoping for: “Yes, they were.”
The PM’S reprieve disappointed the Westminster gossip mill, but had the Conservatives really won the day? With Sir Keir Starmer’s fate still in the hands of Durham police, Labour at least retained a chance of deposing their lame-duck leader. But with no more fines on the horizon and no Bolingbroke in the wings, the Tories’ fate seemed sealed.