Boris bashers have little to show for all their sound and fury
WHEN Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer lock horns next week over the final report by the senior mandarin Sue Gray into unlawful Downing Street gatherings, a police inquiry will loom large.
But it will not be an inquiry into Johnson, who learned on Thursday that he faces no further fines at the conclusion of the Metropolitan Police’s “Partygate” investigation.
Instead, it will be the Labour leader under the shadow of a police probe into his “Beergate” booze-up in Durham. After months of berating Johnson for alleged “industrial scale” lockdown breaches and calling for him to resign for being subject to police investigation, Starmer risks being seen both as a hypocrite and a laughing stock.
The Met Police found that, over roughly 18 months, eight gatherings in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office breached lockdown law. Some 126 penalty notices were issued to 83 people, the vast majority of them civil servants rather than political figures.
FOR a network of buildings that serves as the workplace for hundreds of people in dozens of different teams, that hardly supports the idea of a bacchanal of excess.
Given that Downing Street was the place where draconian lockdown laws were dreamt up, voters are clearly entitled to feel aggrieved that it did not sustain 100 per cent compliance throughout the pandemic.
But had any other workplace of comparable size that had not been able to switch to working from home been subjected to such a level of media and police scrutiny, would it have been found to have done any better?
The sum total of the Prime Minister’s personal breaches amounted to a single nine-minute gathering in the middle of a working day at which he was presented with a birthday cake by his wife and others before a scheduled meeting. Even for the most obsessive Boris-bashers in the media and political establishments, it’s not much, is it?
The snarling reaction of the Prime Minister’s many detractors to such a disappointment has been amusing to behold. Some now pin their hopes on hyping up a more damning verdict from Ms Gray rather in the manner that they fought for a second Brexit referendum to overturn the result of the first.
But after having bounced the police into devoting disproportionate resources to a criminal inquiry in the hope of toppling Johnson, it is the conclusions of that investigation which must clearly take precedence.
The sensible majority of the British public not eaten up with animus towards the PM should file Partygate with the political establishment’s previous ruse to try to oust him: the idea that Britain was suffering a uniquely terrible Covid death rate. An authoritative report by the World Health Organisation – largely ignored by the broadcast media – found earlier this month that Britain’s excess death rate during the pandemic was in fact lower than most comparable countries, including Italy and even Germany.
THE main difference between us and the others was that while we had published accurate statistics they had drastically undercounted their fatalities.
So all the hundreds of hours of TV news claims of a singularly British catastrophe amounted to little more than – to quote Shakespeare – “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”.
During the many genuine challenges ahead for Johnson’s administration, including the cost-of-living crisis and the huge backlog of NHS procedures caused by Covid, opposition politicians and the media will have a legitimate role scrutinising its performance.
Such is the hostility towards him in those quarters that there will no doubt be further examples of ludicrously over-hyped criticism. One danger is that this constant crying of wolf over relatively minor matters will lead to a climate of disbelief when the Government actually does fail badly on a first order issue.
Another is that some of those who are supposed to be on the Government’s side – principally its own backbench MPs – will continue to work as accomplices to its enemies in their attempts to destroy the PM.
Several such MPs who prematurely denounced Johnson over Partygate have already done a U-turn. A good few of these “useful idiots” should have been dumped by Johnson at the last election after they deliberately obstructed his efforts to get Britain out of the EU.
Governing in Britain’s adversarial political system is tough, sometimes akin to a blood sport.Any prime minister is entitled to expect his own troops won’t side with the enemy at the first whiff of grapeshot.
‘The public should file Partygate with previous ruse to oust PM’