In bruising interview with Mumsnet chief: It would have been wrong to quit over Partygate, says PM
BORIS Johnson has revealed he thought about quitting over Partygate, but decided it would not have been ‘responsible’.
The Prime Minister said it would be wrong to ‘abandon’ ship as the nation grapples with the rising cost of living and war in Ukraine.
The remarks came in a gruelling, noholds-barred interview in No 10 with Justine Roberts, chief executive of the parenting website Mumsnet.
Miss Roberts, 54, who is married to Ian Katz – a former editor of BBC Newsnight and deputy editor of The Guardian who is now an executive at Channel 4 – grilled the PM over the lockdown breaching Downing Street parties.
In the interview, released yesterday, Mr Johnson said he had been ‘very, very surprised and taken aback’ to receive a £50 fixed penalty notice from the police after attending a gathering in the Cabinet Room in June 2020 for his birthday.
But he said that ‘no cake was consumed’ by him at the ‘miserable event’.
‘If people look at the event in question it felt to me like a work event. I was there for a very short period of time in the Cabinet [Room] at my desk and, you know, I was very, very surprised and taken aback to get an FPN (fixed penalty notice). But of course I paid it,’ he added.
Mr Johnson insisted he was justified in attending leaving parties during lockdown because it was important to ‘keep
‘Totally miserable experience’
morale high’ in No 10.
‘Everybody who is here, we’re in the building where everyone is working blindingly hard,’ he said.
‘They were all under the rules meant to be here. What I thought I was doing was simply doing what is right for a leader in any circumstances, and that’s to thank people for their service. If you don’t do that people feel under-appreciated and under-motivated. This was a time when we had to keep morale high, when the whole place was under a huge amount of pressure.’
Mr Johnson admitted he had considered his future as prime minister over the party saga, but believed it was right to stay in post.
‘I think that on [the question of] why am I still here, I’m still here because we’ve got huge pressures economically, we’ve got to get on, you know, we’ve got the biggest war in Europe for 80 years, and we’ve got a massive agenda to deliver which I was elected to deliver,’ he said.
‘I’ve thought about all these questions a lot, as you can imagine, and I just cannot see how actually it’d be responsible right now – given everything that is going on – simply to abandon the project which I embarked on.’ Miss Roberts put to him that some believe he has lost the trust of the people, to which Mr Johnson replied: ‘I’m not going to deny the whole thing hasn’t been a totally miserable experience for people in Government and we’ve got to learn from it and understand the mistakes we made and we’ve got to move forward.’
Miss Roberts asked Mr Johnson: ‘Why should we believe anything you say when it’s been proved you’re a habitual liar?’, which he rebuffed: ‘I don’t agree with the conclusion, with the question asked or the premise of the question.’