Why “partygate” matters
The context is more important than the details. Matthew Partridge reports
At the time of writing, prime minister Boris Johnson was preparing to “fight for his political life” as he awaited Sue Gray’s report into alleged lockdown-breaking parties in Whitehall, says the Financial Times. The report comes after a string of revelations, most recently a “surprise birthday party” for the PM during the lockdown in June 2020. The Metropolitan Police have also said they will be launching their own inquiry, although this will not delay the report, as was previously assumed. At the very least, Johnson faces a major challenge to his leadership – many Tory MPs are expected to be waiting for the report’s conclusions before pushing for a vote of no confidence.
Let’s hope for an outbreak of common sense
The revelations have sparked outrage, probably not due to the specific, often minor, infractions of the rules, but rather to the fact that it makes all of those who took them seriously, sometimes at great personal cost, “look like idiots”, says Alice Thomson in The Times. That points to a clear lesson: on the occasion of the next pandemic or major national crisis, we will need “more common sense and less hypocrisy”, with leaders, civil servants and scientists only issuing edicts that they themselves are prepared to follow. “If they don’t think they are sane or sensible for themselves, it isn’t appropriate to force them on Queen or country.”
Like most people, I’m upset about the hypocrisy of the PM “partying on the same day I sat in a park with one other person”, says Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. Still, things are going a little too far. What started as a query into “whether government officials broke their own rules” has “morphed into something more authoritarian, more vengeful, and more threatening to the democratic process than an illicit cheeseand-wine party could ever be” – an attempt to “take down” the elected leader of this country. “This has to stop.”
Poisoning public life
It’s true that the whole saga has “elements of soap opera”, with the prime minister’s enemies, especially his former political adviser Dominic Cummings, apparently “drip-dripping information” in an attempt to bring him down, says The Guardian. Still, Johnson’s refusal “to accept that rules his government told others to stick to” (on pain of fines of up to £10,000) also apply to him is not only a moral failing, but could also “poison attitudes to politicians and public life more generally”. In any case, “partygate” is just one problem in a list of “wider concerns” about the probity of the government’s conduct.
Indeed, Johnson’s two and a half years as PM “have been punctuated by scandal after scandal”, including “PPE contracts for cronies, selling peerages to donors, ‘wallpapergate’, and free luxury holidays”, so “it would be surprising if ‘partygate’ was the last”, says Martin Fletcher in the New Statesman. (See below.) Even if he clings on to power, this misbehaviour has rendered his “stonking majority” useless, leaving government “paralysed” at a time when the country is facing many “pressing problems”, including soaring inflation, fuel prices and NHS waiting lists.
These won’t be solved by a PM who is “divisive, diminished and utterly lacking in authority”.