Impossible that ‘biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry’ wouldn’t have been signed off by a minister

BORIS Johnson’s mobile phone started buzzing as he was making the final preparations at his London home on Friday for his trip to the United States. Assuming it would concern a lastminute run-through of his itinerary, which included a meeting with former US president George W Bush, he decided to take the call.

Even Boris, who would be the first to concede he’s had a roller- coaster of a political life, was not prepared for what came next.

One of his aides was ringing to tell him that Alex Chisholm, the Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office who has the ear of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, had handed documents – which could reportedly demonstrate that Boris had breached lockdown rules – to Scotland Yard and Thames Valley Police.

The documents contained information taken by Cabinet Office staff from an official diary kept in the department’s archive. This diary is a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, account of the prime minister’s working day for the entire length of his or her premiership.

Compiled by civil servants, with no input from the PM himself, it details the meetings he attends, how long they last, and who he talks to, whether in Downing Street, at his official country residence Chequers, in Buckinghamshire, or anywhere else.

Boris’s caller reported that the documents handed to police contained a dozen or so entries from the diary. But that was not all.

Chisholm had also written to the Commons Privileges Committee, chaired by Labour MP Harriet Harman, which is investigating whether the former PM ‘recklessly’ misled Parliament over lockdown parties held at Downing Street. Chisholm suggested in his covering letter to the committee that Boris may indeed have breached the Covid laws.

Remember that this committee has the power to recommend suspending Boris from Parliament for ten days or more, which would inevitably lead to a perilous byelection in his Uxbridge constituency. It was due to report in the next two weeks and, according to informed speculation at Westminster, was not about to deliver a terminal blow to Boris.

But this unexpected intervention by the Cabinet Office will almost certainly delay the outcome and could even seal his fate.

To add insult to injury, Boris discovered the news of the ‘questionable’ diary entries being sent to the police and the Privileges Committee had been conveyed not by Chisholm himself but in a call to Boris’s office by a middle-ranking Cabinet Office official from its ethics and propriety team.

As Boris rapidly digested the contents and implications of the phone call, he flew into a terrible rage. The former PM roared into the phone that he was the victim of a ‘stitch-up’ by the Left-leaning Civil Service which had never forgiven him for Brexit, or for winning a landslide general election victory in 2019. ‘I have never known Boris so angry,’ one of his friends told me last night. ‘He was enraged. And nearly a week later he still is. His temper outburst was volcanic.

There is now a clear view that civil servants, who got wind of the fact the Privileges Committee sanction against Boris might not be as draconian as they had hoped, decided to dig deeper to try to find more smoking guns.’

Which is why they turned, so assiduously, to the Cabinet Office diary of the PM’s movements. It is written by civil servants for civil servants and for the official record. Most prime ministers never even look at the diary entries. ‘Why would they?’ said one Whitehall source. ‘It’s an arid document with millions of densely typed words. From my recollection of working with Boris, he was never one to read 10,000-page documents.’

So has the Cabinet Office found the smoking gun that many believe it was looking for?

Contrary to some reports, the dozen or so events taken from in the official journal were not all about social gatherings with family and friends at Chequers. The majority were, in fact, work meetings at Downing Street. True, one entry refers to ‘Boris Johnson private lunch’ in the Downing Street flat. But it was, in fact, lunch in the Downing Street garden with Boris and his mother Charlotte, who died in September 2021. And it took place after September 2020 and after the new ‘rule of six’ was introduced during the pandemic.

(The ‘rule of six’ simplified and strengthened the rules on social gatherings, making them easier to understand and easier for the police to enforce. It meant that – apart from a set of limited exemptions when it came to work and education – any social gatherings of more than six people would be against the law.)

Another No 10 private meeting was with the ITV broadcaster Kate Garraway whose husband Derek Draper has been gravely ill with Covid. This was also after the ‘rule of six’ had been introduced. The Garraway meeting, to discuss long Covid with civil servants present, was arranged by civil servants. It was within the rules.

What is more, as part of his preparations for the public hearings into Covid, which are due to start later this year, Boris recruited blue-chip law firm Peters & Peters to advise him. The firm’s lawyers painstakingly pored over every entry in the 10,000-page diary and, according to a Boris supporter, gave them a clean bill of health.

‘Those diary entries are watertight legally,’ he said. ‘If the Cabinet Office had come to Boris first they could have saved themselves an awful lot of time. You have to ask why they didn’t. Did they want to generate a political stink? Seems like it.’

The same 10,000 pages were also available to Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant who conducted the Whitehall inquiry into alleged lockdown-breaking parties which was published last year. Gray never highlighted any of the meetings which have been referred to police.

But what is troubling Boris and his supporters even more about the information from the diaries is the strong suspicion that he is the victim of a cynical smear operation. Senior Tory MPs I spoke to yesterday, including ministers, told me they thought it inconceivable that the Cabinet Office would have gone to the police about a serving MP, let alone a former prime minister, without first alerting a Cabinet minister or No 10.

The obvious first port of call would be Oliver Dowden, the Cabinet Office minister who took over as Deputy Prime Minister after Dominic Raab was forced out of his job by the Whitehall ‘Blob’. Dowden, a Remainer, is Sunak’s closest political friend.

One senior minister told me: ‘These are murky waters. I find it hard to believe that potential evidence of law-breaking against an MP, let alone the former prime minister... would be taken to the police without having it first signed off by a very senior minister. Would that senior minister tell the Prime Minister? Yes, of course he or she would.’

The Daily Mail has also learned that the decision to involve the Privileges Committee was signed off by Dowden’s deputy, Jeremy Quin, the number two minister in the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office denies he or any other minister was involved in the decision to tell the police. ‘The chances of Quin not telling Dowden, his boss, are nil,’ says my source.

If the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, the most senior civil servant in the land, was in the loop, he would also be duty-bound to tell the Prime Minister.

Civil service opposition to outspoken Brexiteers has been all too apparent in recent times. Last month, Whitehall saw off Raab over bullying allegations. They tried and failed to topple Suella Braverman, another Brexiteer, over a speeding offence. There have been rumbles against Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, who also backed Brexit.

Boris, however, would be their biggest prize. A Boris supporter said: ‘I fear this will be spun out of all control by Boris’s enemies. Yet this is not about parties, wine fridges in Downing Street, or leaving parties, it is about work meetings and a few social gatherings within the more relaxed rules.’

Naturally, Boris and his team are fighting back hard. They are seriously considering suing the Cabinet Office for ‘wasting police time’, which is a criminal offence. The sanction, if found guilty, is a fine or up to six months in jail. Or the police can, as they did with Boris and Rishi over a so- called lockdown party, issue a fixed penalty notice. Which would be the ultimate irony.

As head of the Cabinet Office it would be Oxford- educated Chisholm, 55, the Permanent Secretary since 2020, whose name would be on the writ. Before he joined the civil service Chisholm was publisher and general manager of the Financial Times Group which was a prominent cheerleader for Remain in the referendum, and his liberal credentials are burnished by his marriage to Eliza Pakenham, the granddaughter of the late Labour peer Lord Longford, the veteran prison reformer.

‘This is the biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry,’ insisted one Boris supporter. And the former PM and his team are determined to find out who is weaving the threads.

‘They decided to dig deeper for smoking guns’

Boris and his team are fighting back hard – and could sue the Cabinet Office for wasting police time