£180K COST OF LIVING IT UP
AN eye-watering £180,000 of public cash could be spent probing parties at No10 – as law-abiding Brits face a cost of living crisis.
Some sources put the cost of Sue Gray’s Whitehall probe as high as £80,000. And a Met Police investigation could add £100,000 or more to the bill.
A Cabinet Office source said no “additional public money” had been spent on civil servant Sue Gray’s inquiry.
But several senior civil servants from the Propriety and Ethics unit have been devoting their working time to the probe for weeks.
And over at the Met, police officers are sifting through hundreds of photographs, CCTV images and other evidence. Asked by Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner to confirm the cost of the Gray inquiry, Tory Cabinet Office
Minister Michael Ellis refused. He said: “The Government does not comment on internal resourcing matters.”
Ms Rayner told the Sunday Mirror: “Time after time, taxpayers pay for the Prime Minister’s personal failures.
“Boris Johnson could have saved so much time and expense by simply telling the truth in the first place, and now he’s adding insult to injury by refusing to come clean on the costs.”
The alarming cost of probing parties in lockdown emerged as a £700-a-year hike in home fuel is set to hit families – plus a rise in National Insurance and inflation at 5.4% .
A former Met officer said the force would be “torn” between carrying out a thorough probe to avoid any “unexploded bombs” while also keeping costs as low as possible.
Ex-Scotland Yard Det Chief Insp Peter Kirkham said a team of five to 10 officers sifting through vast swathes of evidence over a period of weeks could cost in excess of £100,000.
He said: “This is why the police do not do
reactive investigations of minor offences that are only going to lead to a fine. Even if these people get the full £10,000 ticket, although most of them will not, the question is ‘Why are we spending all this money to achieve this’?
“With offences like speeding, we ask what are the justifications for spending a shedload of money? Normally there isn’t one, to spend vast amounts of money like this. This isn’t murder, it’s not got life imprisonment attached to it.
“The police didn’t want this investigation in the first place but the Commissioner [Dame
Cressida Dick] is in a no-win situation. If she doesn’t spend she would be criticised for going at it half-cocked and ‘helping Boris off the hook’.
“If she does spend and someone adds the costs up, they’ll say it cost huge sums to achieve fines of a few hundred quid.
“She loses every time. That’s why the police are not the appropriate agency to deal with this.”
The probes bill emerged as Tory MPs faced a weekend of soul-searching over whether to send letters of no-confidence in Boris Johnson’s leadership, following a chaotic “clear-out” of staff and advisers. As many as 15 backbenchers have publicly urged Mr Johnson to go. And sources suggested the number of no-confidence letters could be in the 40s – just a handful shy of the 54 needed to trigger a vote among Tory MPs.
The PM came under more pressure yesterday as the Mirror revealed police had been given a snap of him holding a can of lager at a birthday party in No10 that was allegedly against lockdown