While they partied, I was cheated out of the last days with my dying partner...
Remember how police cracked down hard on us that May week?
My Most precious possession is the birthday card my partner Nigel gave me as he was dying. I keep it close by my bedside, and blow a kiss to it every morning.
Nigel gave me the card, with a message inside, on the afternoon of May 20, 2020: a glorious spring day.
that was the sunny evening of the Downing street garden party where mask-free guests mingled from 6pm to share bottles of ‘bring your own’ wine.
the tables, no doubt, were being set up for that illicit soiree when Nigel and I met in the lobby of a private north London hospital where he was being treated.
the Covid rules were draconian: both of us were masked to the hilt, and I even donned an old pair of large purple sunglasses to avoid catching the virus through my eyes or passing it to Nigel.
Now the memory of that dreadfully sad day seems even more cruel.
How angry it has made me to think of myself and Nigel – who used to play tennis with Boris Johnson and considered himself a fan of the Prime Minister – were taken for fools by the Government.
Every painful memory of the birthday visit has come flooding back to me with renewed agony as more details emerge of how those who ran the country during the pandemic, and imposed its wretched rules on the rest of us, were so ready to flout them themselves.
What I would have given to spend that last birthday with Nigel in a spacious London garden, sipping a glass of fine wine and laughing without a care in the world – as he always made me feel.
special permission had been granted for my birthday visit because Nigel had persuaded the hospital’s most senior administrator personally.
His case was an emergency: intravenous antibiotics were to be pumped into his 6ft4in body to battle sepsis. It was thought he’d become infected through his chemo port during four months of gruelling medical treatment.
I was so excited to see him – but he was clearly a weakened soul.
I had brought a small picnic to try to make it an occasion, but the ever-polite
Nigel struggled to touch it. He had lost stones in weight: his trousers were falling off, his face was sunken, his skin so pale. As I looked into his brown eyes, I was terrified at his deterioration.
But I didn’t want to frighten him by saying that out loud.
At one stage, my gaze wandered over Nigel’s head, as he sat forlornly in a chair in the lobby. A delivery man walked in from the road outside and waited with a parcel outside the lift a few feet from us. He wasn’t wearing a mask – and I was so enraged I took a photo of him on my phone. I also took a snap of an unmasked hospital patient leaving the same lift and going outside to smoke a cigarette. there wasn’t a glance or a rebuke from the hospital’s reception desk.
Clearly, there were already pandemic rules for some but not for others in this hospital – just as, over in Downing street that same day, the glasses were being polished and the guest list totted up.
Like thousands of others obeying the rules – often at huge personal cost – I feel as though I have been laughed at by the hypocrites stalking the corridors of power. I realise that Nigel and I were cheated of our time together in his final days.
We were desperately keen to see each other, messaging one another 18 times a day as he was incarcerated in a room at the hospital with no visits allowed.
By then, Nigel said his nurses had told him the hospital was overwhelmed with Covid and non-Covid patients being transferred there by a National Health service unable to cope.
Nigel had been diagnosed with bile-duct cancer in January 2020. soon after he began chemotherapy, he collapsed and became delirious. It was, said the oncologists, caused by a ‘mystery infection’.
His final hospital visit was two weeks before my birthday, when the private doctors rang our home to say tests showed he had the mystery infection again and must go in immediately.
I went with him in a black cab to the hospital’s door.
I was hurried away after being told he would be isolated in one room because of the pandemic (although he never tested positive for Covid at any stage). I would not be allowed to see him and nor would any of his family.
I could not speak to the doctors face to face. the result was that I could not stand by his bedside and fight his corner as a
‘I couldn’t stand by his bedside to fight his corner’
GRIEVING families of Covid victims yesterday called on boris Johnson to apologise as he ducked questions over Downing Street’s ‘lockdownbusting’ party.
They told how they were kept apart from loved ones for months by virus curbs and even forced to say goodbye to the dying over Zoom while No10 held a ‘bring your own booze’ bash.
Relatives said they had been treated with contempt and called on the Prime Minister to come clean over his involvement in the Downing Street garden party.
Teacher Hannah brady, 25, whose father Shaun’s death certificate was signed on the day of the event – May 20, 2020 – said Mr Johnson should admit if he attended or knew about it. She insisted: ‘If it’s proven he attended that party or he knew about it then he should resign.
‘It’s unspinnable. The person who’s in charge of keeping this country safe is just chipping away at his own moral authority.’ Miss brady was among members of five families who met Mr Johnson at Downing Street last September to represent the Covid-19 bereaved Families For Justice Group.
She told him how her father, from Wigan, had died and later her grandmother Margaret was also killed by the virus without knowing her son had perished.
Miss brady wrote to Mr Johnson yesterday on behalf of the group, saying they felt the party was ‘a flagrant breach of the Government’s own rules’.
She wrote: ‘In September of last year you looked me in the eyes in the Rose Garden of Downing Street and told me you had done everything you could to save him. you saw photos of his last days that no one had ever seen before. It is now clear that while my Dad’s death certificate was being signed – and me and my younger sister were grieving alone – dozens of people were gathered, clutching a bottle they had been invited to bring, in the same place you told me you had done everything you could.’
Miss brady said the party revelations had caused ‘pain, anguish and anger’ to grieving families.
Elena Ciesco, 49, could only see her father Luigi, a retired NHS worker, through a window at his home in Surrey on his 79th birthday – the day of the Downing Street party. He died from Covid in December that year. She said: ‘While we stuck to the rules, Downing Street broke the law and they should be prosecuted. boris Johnson should be prosecuted.’
‘PM should be prosecuted’