Partygate is really about leadership, lies and the death of trust

Partygate is not about parties. It never has been. It is about personal integrity and standards in public life. The Prime Minister can put the parties, the booze, the vomiting and all the rest of it behind him. What he cannot put behind him is the sort of person that he is.

Three points stand out from this grubby saga.

First, the Prime Minister personally decided to criminalise almost all social contact, and then behaved as if this did not apply to him or those around him. It really does not matter whether he thought that his parties were allowed by the regulations. Their rationale was that unnecessary human contact was so dangerous that it must be forbidden by law. He cannot have believed a word of it himself. Otherwise, he would surely not have exposed himself or his staff to this supposedly mortal danger, whether it was technically permitted by the regulations or not. He made his own risk assessment, while denying the rest of us the right to make ours.

Secondly, the Prime Minister has persistently tried to hide behind his subordinates. No one told him, he has said, that this kind of behaviour was not on. It speaks volumes about his moral values that he needed to be told.

This sort of special pleading is a cowardly reversal of ordinary lines of responsibility. Junior staff took their lead from him. They assumed, as Sue Gray points out, that if he was there it must be OK. More senior staff had their doubts. But their only concern was that it would look bad if it got out (“a comms risk”). At the time they congratulated themselves that they had “got away with it”. Sue Gray goes out of her way to point out that their attitudes were not typical of the rest of Whitehall. We are entitled to ask what was different about Downing Street. The answer is that its occupants knew that the Prime Minister would share their instincts. Under a more exacting boss, they would have feared for their jobs.

Thirdly, and worst of all, the Prime Minister has denied in statements to Parliament that parties occurred, when we now know that they happened regularly in his presence. Weasel words about whether these were “work events” are beside the point. If these statements were not outright lies, they were at the very least half-truths, calculated to mislead. By convention, misleading Parliament is a resignation matter.

All political systems depend on integrity. That means more than just observing the rules. It requires a sense of honour and decency, a reliable instinct about how public men and women should behave.

It calls for an instinctive recognition that there are many things which they should not do even if they legally can. Public trust in politics depends on this. Britain’s unwritten constitution is uniquely dependent on the personal standards of ministers. It is based on conventions not laws, on values not rules. Precisely because politicians can “get away with” so much, their personal integrity matters even more than it does in other political systems.

This is why we cannot just “move on”. We have at the heart of our political order a man who does not care a fig for basic constitutional values, provided that he can stay in power. He is supported by politicians who care more about defending him than about protecting our political system.

This is exceptionally serious. Political values once flouted with impunity cannot easily be restored. Conventions once broken disappear. We will feel the effects long after we have seen the back of Boris Johnson.

Yes, we are in the midst of an international crisis, as his defenders never cease to tell us. But at such a time it is more important than ever that we should be led by people of transparent stature and integrity, whom we can implicitly trust.

Our system rests on the behaviour of public servants. That’s why the PM cannot ‘get away with it’