Parties probe turns into farcical cop out

We all wondered how it was taking Sue Gray so long to establish there was a bloody party. Maybe she was making the report like a tapestry, and was having trouble embroidering a birthday cake.

Perhaps it will be released as an opera, so it will cost £60 for a ticket to see it. Then we’ll see a chorus of tenors singing “why do you leave us, do not forsake us?”

Then the sopranos will reply “We go to Waitrose, to fetch more wine,” in red chiffon dresses.

Then a booming bass roars cheekily “It’s a workplace meeting”, all in Italian.

It’s possible the report has become more complicated because it turns out Prince Andrew was at one of the parties.

Or maybe she can’t finish it because there was a 20-piece swing band playing in the No10 bathroom throughout lockdown, and 300 people re-enacting the Battle of El Alamein in the kitchen, so she has to interview all of them.

But now the Met Police have been kind enough to make her job simpler.

Because they insist her investigation should leave out anything about the parties. And an investigation is always easier if you don’t have to include anything that you were investigating.

To keep the police and the Government happy, her report should go: “On Tuesday it was quite sunny. The end.”

Then she can pad it out with 20 pages of dot-to-dot puzzles and a nice picture of farmyard animals, with suggestions for

how to colour them in. The police can make their own lives simpler by applying the same rules to themselves.

When they investigate a robbery, they can leave out everything about the robbery from their investigation and they’ll be able to complete their task much more quickly.

When the police announced they were investigating the parties, we were told this meant the report might be delayed for several more weeks.

That would be convenient.

Maybe they’ll keep this going. So next time the report’s about to appear, it will be announced that the Vatican are investigating the parties to see whether they constituted a mortal sin. So the report can’t be published until there’s a pronouncement from the Pope. In any case, the Government’s supporters now say the whole business of parties against the rules is “trivia”.

Why are we bothering with wine and cakes, when there’s inflation and a might-be-a-war with Russia?

This would make sense, if when Johnson was reading out the rules every single day for several months, he’d said: “But don’t bother sticking to any of this.

“You can do whatever you like, I’d invite your mates round and spend all day naked mud-wrestling if I was you. Remember – Hands – Face – Cake – Bottle – Conga.”

But they insisted we absolutely had to stay alone, while they did the opposite.

And if you were cynical, you might suspect that if they lie so blatantly about that, maybe it’s possible that they lie about everything else as well.

CHEERS Report delay