Tories, look in the mirror: hasn’t the price of being humiliated by Johnson become too high?
Thinking of throwing a boozy office party, a potential super-spreader event in the teeth of a Covid storm? Then knock yourself out, is the official advice from a government accused of being only too willing to open a celebratory bottle itself. Just don’t, whatever you do, enter the office to actually do some work.
The Omicron variant has finally prodded Boris Johnson into adopting his fallback Covid Plan B, and what a classically Johnsonian plan it is; contradictory, rushed and shrouded in murky allegations. From Monday, everyone who can should work from home, but the prime minister wants office bashes and school nativity plays to go ahead. There will be vaccine passports for entering big venues, but no masks in pubs and restaurants.
If these compromises were meant to placate freedom-loving Tories, they failed; backbenchers threatening to rebel en masse were only further incensed when Johnson hinted he was considering making vaccination compulsory. That his own health secretary, Sajid Javid, promptly said this would be unethical indicates how carefully that idea had been debated inside cabinet before being tossed out, seemingly on the hoof.
The kindest explanation for the chaos is that Johnson was distracted by his wife, Carrie, going into labour, as he careered from parliamentary showdown to Covid press conference on
Wednesday. But even some of his own backbenchers are no longer willing to be so charitable, publicly accusing him of playing games with public health to distract attention from the now notorious Christmas party allegedly held in Downing Street during last year’s lockdown – just one of around half a dozen assorted leaving dos and other soirees alleged to have taken place when socialising was banned last year.
Downing Street has repeatedly denied any rules were broken on its premises but only 9% of voters believe them, according to a poll for Sky News; meanwhile, genuinely necessary public health measures are unfortunately tarnished by association with the prime minister. Most people will rightly still obey the new rules, as they always have, for fear of infecting loved ones. But the corrosive suspicion lingers that, as Michael Kill, the dismayed chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association suggested, hospitality might have been thrown under a bus
“for the prime minister to save his own skin”. Just as his magic rubbed off on Conservatives in the good times, now the muck splatters across everything he touches.
Watching a distraught Allegra Stratton gulp her way through her resignation statement this week, you could see this effect unfolding in plain sight. A little over a year ago, she was best known as the aide responsible for artfully polishing the halo of the squeakyclean chancellor Rishi Sunak. Then she was poached by Downing Street to do something similar for Johnson, hosting the televised briefings he briefly considered holding but ditched shortly after she arrived. It was while rehearsing for this job which she never did that Stratton was filmed giggling through questions about a party she says she never attended. On Wednesday, she looked genuinely broken, as if realising for the first time what had become of her.
Whether he knew about the parties or not, the charge against Boris Johnson is that he’s responsible for creating a louche and reckless culture in which anything seemingly goes but all too often those who follow his lead get burned. The former Treasury permanent secretary Nick Macpherson this week tweeted the same lines from The Great Gatsby that have been echoing in my mind all week, about a gilded set who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”, leaving others to pick up the pieces. The question is whether Johnson’s apparent willingness to throw his own team under the bus, by suggesting he had been misled about what happened inside his own building, finally encourages some of those helpful others to cut their losses.
Why do Tories keep metaphorically jumping into bed with him, knowing how it invariably ends? Some assume they can control him, as Dominic Cummings seemingly did, calculating that he would get Brexit done and could then be ousted. A few imagine that they can change him. Others are under no illusions but consider the tradeoffs worth it, for now: a briskly transactional category covering many MPs who voted for him as leader. And it’s on their constantly shifting calculations that much depends.
If Downing Street had given straight answers from the start, Christmas parties might be ancient history by now. But the focus would have merely shifted to the Electoral Commission fining the Conservative party over its role in trying to get donors to fund a makeover of the Johnsons’ private flat, and a curious discrepancy between details in that report and what Johnson previously told Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ministerial interests, about the renovations. If not that, it would have been fresh allegations that during the chaotic British evacuation of Afghanistan either Boris or Carrie Johnson controversially intervened to help get the animal rescuer Pen Farthing and his menagerie out of Kabul, which Downing Street has also previously denied.
It’s no longer just about whether voters care, but whether MPs sent out publicly to defend the line can look themselves in the mirror. The Conservative party must ask itself whether it is content to keep being humiliated like this by its own leader or whether, like a long-suffering mistress tired of spending weekends alone, it can finally summon the self-respect to break free.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist