The blackout’s worrying lessons for No10

Then as now, the ‘Crown Property’ defence failed to assuage anger at the rulebreaking political class

The cakeist French monarch Marie Antoinette noted, some time before losing her head in 1793, that “there is nothing new except what has been forgotten”. And so it might prove of partygate and official attempts to wriggle out of it.

As Sue Gray, the civil servant charged with investigating the Downing Street parties, sifts through the archives for useful precedent, she will surely stumble across the story of London’s war-time blackout and its shameful enforcement in Whitehall.

The blackout, which was first used in naval shipyards during the First World War and then applied nationally in the second, offers many parallels to the controversies of the Covid restrictions we have faced in recent years.

It covered the whole of Britain, lasting for almost the full six years of war. Winston Churchill drafted the original regulations in 1913, but in the Second World War railed against them in the face of staunch opposition from the Air Ministry, fearing they would sap national morale.

Indeed, the war-time leader’s somewhat schizophrenic messaging on the issue might be what led to Whitehall becoming the most notorious of rule-benders, attracting national opprobrium.

The blackout was in many ways “the most obtrusive of civil defence measures for it had to be observed daily and completely,” notes Richard Overy in his book The Bombing War. “In cities, air-raid wardens patrolled from day one of the war to report any chink of light, and, because it was an offence, unlike other civil defence regulations, persistent offenders were fined.”

And who were the most persistent and notorious offenders? Well, according to a PHD thesis by Marc Wiggam, one of Mr Overy’s students, it was not ordinary working people, who on the whole took the blackout measures extremely seriously, but the gilded class of politicians and officials who occupied Whitehall.

“The political impact of the blackout was such that the state might have been expected to have led by example,” writes Wiggam. “But perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the early days of the war was the difficulty the state found in blacking out its own property adequately, and the potential for undermining the integrity of the blackout this caused.”

A survey of Whitehall conducted in the first weeks of the war found numerous breaches in government buildings. The same occurred a few months later in November 1939. The Metropolitan police (which in those days still did investigations) reported that buildings occupied by the Treasury and Air Ministry had caused “trouble on several occasions”, sparking widespread anger.

Just as officials today have floated the idea that Crown Property might somehow be exempt from the current lockdown rules, Whitehall officials initially cited Crown immunity in a bid to escape prosecution for breaches of the blackout during the war.

“A legal note from the Treasury solicitor to the Treasury secretary made it plain the Crown had immunity from prosecution under the Defence orders,” says Wiggam. But recognising the political impact exercising this immunity would have, the note added: “I do not think there is any objection to each department appointing some senior official on whom the summons can be served.”

Might Boris Johnson try the same trick today? Could he claim Crown immunity or, failing that, pin the blame on a hapless official?

The first line of defence has already been removed. Although the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 does include exemptions for Crown Property, it was confirmed only last week by the Cabinet Office that the regulations “apply regardless of whether those activities took place on Crown property or not”.

That leaves the “pin-it-on-an official defence”, which as we have seen also has precedent, since it was the same tactic used by politicians during the war. The most obvious official in the firing line is Boris Johnsons’s own principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, from whose email the invitation to the party was sent.

Mr Reynolds is reported to be keen on taking up an ambassadorship after leaving Whitehall. Perhaps Ms Gray could square this with his use of “we” in the BYOB party invitation?