Preoccupation with ‘partygate’ is bad for nation

IT SHOULDN’T happen to a dog. Scotland Yard’s untimely and pettifogging entry into the “partygate” investigation has prolonged the state of uncertainty in the Government after Sue Gray’s edited report.

It is clear that the Metropolitan Police are as preoccupied as the rest of our institutions with trivia. They also seem oblivious of the irony of investigating the goings on in a building as closely policed as Downing Street.

Let me be clear: I do not under-estimate the damage the assorted booze-ups have done to the Prime Minister and the Civil Service. They have inevitably had the nation talking scathingly about “them and us” and a cartoonist hanging a “Wetherspoons” sign over the No 10 door.

But we cannot sensibly allow them to bring down a PM, especially when the dripdrip of revelations has been orchestrated by the vindictive Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chef adviser.

It is time we got things in perspective. This week Boris, however distracted, has his eye on the ball by travelling to Kiev to demonstrate the UK’s support for the sovereignty and freedom of Eastern European states to decide their own destiny. He would also probably have spoken to the expansionist Vladimir Putin but for Sue Gray’s (interim) “partygate” report getting in the way.

This is no time to precipitate a Tory leadership election and possibly a national poll with so many pressing issues, apart from Russia’s (and China’s) expansionism, coupled with a Western leadership vacuum, even though US president

Joe Biden has latterly been performing more robustly. We have an economy ravaged by the pandemic, horrendous debts limiting what any government can do about a host of domestic social problems and a cost of living crisis.

We need to find a way of giving Boris and his staff a kick up the backside for their foolishness. If the situation has not improved after the two or three years left to him, then he will deserve all he gets.

He needs to recognise that his carefree days of busking it are over. Either he introduces a disciplined approach to governance – and especially the presentation of deeds and policies – or he has had it.

He cannot go on lurching from one crisis to another. The reality is bad enough without making it worse through foolishness.

It is claimed that he needs a clear out of the current crop of No 10 advisers and civil servants. A changing of the guard might ease matters but I suspect the problem lies not so much with the Civil Service as with Spads – special advisers – who are wet behind the ears and effectively earning their party political spurs at the public’s expense. Their presentational advice has been abysmal.

I may have spent my 24 years in the Civil Service fighting the obsessive secrecy and elitism of the machine, but I would generally never accuse it of failing to give considered advice.

It may be argued that they failed in allowing “partygate” to develop. They may indeed, but the partygoers, it seems, were effectively a workplace “bubble”. What’s more natural than to ease the pressure than a pint and a pie?

In any case, it is not just a re-formation of the system at the heart of government that is needed. The Parliamentary Tory Party needs to change.

So far, its performance has been distinguished, if that is the right word, by animus over Boris personally, Brexit and a deep split between the Conservative purists and the more realistic.

How can the purists claim

Boris needs to recognise that his carefree days of busking it are over.

to be responsible, prudent Conservatives when they clamour for lower taxes or tax relief with a budget deficit of £300bn?

It is one thing to ease the pain of inflation but it is entirely another to load our grandchildren and future generations with more debt.

That last sentence demonstrates what a fix any government led by any plausible substitute for Boris would find themselves in. What is more, the PM in this respect is not the author of our real problems, even if he is lax about public spending. Nobody saw the coronavirus pandemic coming when he went to No 10.

Finally, there is no wartime unity of purpose that we saw in the Second World War. That basic fact underlines the need not just for Boris to be converted to discipline but for his Parliamentary party to face up to its responsibilities, too.

We did not elect it to play games or lead us back into Brussels’ bondage.