The British government has hit its lowest point with Partygate
While people were saying goodbye to dying relatives on Facetime, Number 10 was running like a frat house.
Good leaders lead by example. Boris Johnson has done the absolute opposite. During the pandemic, the Queen showed fantastic leadership, as she and her family had done during WW2 when they remained in London and walked amongst the bombed buildings. The height of her leadership and personal sacrifice was when her husband died, and she sat alone at his funeral. I felt at the time that she really could have had one or more of her children by her side, and that would have been pretty-well within the rules, but no, she followed the rules to the letter, setting an example and suffering alongside her people.
She was not alone. Like many people, I saw and heard of numerous stories during the pandemic that I can only describe as horror stories. People unable to see dying relatives in hospital, elderly couples separated by lockdowns in care homes. One elderly couple were kept apart in hospital due to the rules, and the husband was only wheeled into his wife’s room to hold her hand as she died, before he then died too. It is beyond heart-breaking. It was also, quite often, unnecessary and unimaginative.
As a country, we came together. We widely did what we were told, however bizarre or irrational that sometimes was. Individuals made awful, life changing sacrifices that will be on their conscience for the rest of their lives — not saying goodbye to dying children, partners, parents. Not having funerals, having weddings alone. The suffering is beyond comprehension and will sit with our society for generations.
Unlike the Queen, who suffered alongside her people, those making the rules in Downing Street did the opposite. They clearly felt the rules they created were for ‘the people,’ not for them.
The latest photos of Boris Johnson toasting a colleague in a room full of people, with drinks and snacks on the tables is genuinely shocking. Beyond the behaviour in full view here, the way these people think is really revealed by one Conservative MP, Desmond Swayne (@DesmondSwayne), who responded in the media by saying: “It was a work do. It’s what people do at work — you have leaving dos.” This suggests that Johnson was not alone in viewing the very rules he had instructed us to follow as being for ‘them’ but not ‘us.’
The reality is, most people didn’t get to go to work or see their colleagues at all, let alone have ‘leaving dos.’ Indeed, the ultimate of all ‘leaving dos’, the funeral, was something most people didn’t even get to do. People died and were buried with only their closest relatives by their grave. There were no friends and relatives there to toast their departure, no people around to support their closest family. In many cases, there were no people there to see them off at all. I was invited to several funerals online, but just couldn’t bring myself to watch on my laptop as someone I’d known was buried, and their close family cried alone.
The BBC reported one woman saying about her husband’s death: “Neither of my kids could be there, they had to Facetime their father. Their last memory of their father was to Facetime him and my last memory is him saying to me ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning’. One of the events [at Downing Street]- on 20 May when they had the ‘bring your own beer’ [event] — was the day I buried my husband and I had just my kids with me. And it’s just not fair.”
Whilst most of the country was living a brutally ascetic life, isolated, silent, lonely and anxious, Number 10 seems to have been running like a frat house. What is most demoralising is Sue Gray’s revelation of internal messages about ‘getting away’ with parties, hiding them from the media, and ‘drinks that aren’t drinks.’
“Best of luck — a complete non story but better than them focusing on our drinks (which we seem to have got away with).” — Martin Reynolds, Principal Private secretary to the PM
It is like reading the messages between a group of rowdy teenagers having parties while their parents are away, except these are senior civil servants and political advisors. It really is pathetic.
Some Conservative politicians are abandoning Johnson; true conservatism is not this, and they know it. Yet, many Conservative politicians are still making excuses for Boris Johnson. It is some sort of wilful blindness, or institutional denial. It is a selfish calculation to cling onto their political careers regardless of the cost to the country. Our democracy is damaged when our leaders act with impunity. Our systems of rules are weakened when those who make them also flaunt them so shamelessly.
Reading the news today it is hard to understand how anyone in this government is still in their job. Something this bad should have brought down the government. The fact that this government is insistent on lying and bluffing their way through the scandal, and that their parliamentarians lack the morality to oust them, speaks volumes for how little interest the Conservative party has for anything or anyone apart from itself. It also reflects badly on the Labour party that they do not have the force to stop this.
History will have nothing good to say about Boris Johnson or his government. Every inquiry and report finds them to have failed at every turn, from the latest report into the debacle of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, to the fines issued to people in Downing Street for breaches of laws drawn up in Downing Street. The country is falling apart economically and socially. This will stick to conservatives who back Johnson like shit to a bear.