Lies, damned lies and Downing Street Christmas parties
(Alamy)
Christmas parties, especially office ones, have always been a minefield. Tensions rise to the surface, jokes go wrong, liberties are taken. Above all, everyone has had a bit (often a lot) too much to drink. Not many festivities cause quite as much trouble, though, as the now notorious Downing Street party that took place a year ago, just days after all such gatherings were banned under lockdown rules. What had been a minor irritant has grown into a major scandal, as dangerous to the Government’s credibility as any that we have seen before. And now the proof has surfaced, in the form of a video.
It wasn’t supposed to have happened, everyone present pretended it hadn’t happened — and yet everyone knows that it did happen. Grilled about this ghost party by Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister has stuck rigidly to the line that all Covid rules were followed. That position implies that any such gathering was a work meeting, not a party — and thus legal. It looks as though that was what staff at Number 10 were told to say, if anyone asked.
But the emergence of the video, made shortly afterwards, has broken the omertà. It shows Allegra Stratton, then the Government’s official spokesperson, preparing answers to a possible line of questioning about the “business meeting”. She giggles and grins as other members of the press team, including the media adviser Ed Oldfield, joke about it. “It wasn’t a party, it was cheese and wine,” says one. Ms Stratton is very much in on the joke, but warns the others “this is recorded”, implying that she knows how risqué the joke is. She concludes: “This fictional party was a business meeting,” but then she adds meaningfully: “And it was not socially distanced.”
What is damaging about this incident is not merely that it blows the official line out of the water, but that it presents the public with a spectacle of Downing Street staffers having a laugh — literally at their expense — about a matter of life and death. For millions who have been bereaved or laid low by the pandemic, the memory of last winter is a nightmare. And the thought of senior officials making a mockery of the rules that they had just announced is distasteful, to say the least.
It’s worse than that, much worse. Like Dominic Cummings and his trip to Barnard Castle, or Matt Hancock and his office affair, this story is easy to understand. It has already “cut through”. Even the normally apolitical comedians Ant and Dec instantly came up with a sarcastic gag on their evening show that included a surprisingly sharp dig at the Prime Minister. The buck stops with him. People are angry and they have every right to be.
Today the knife will doubtless be twisted at Prime Minister’s Questions. Keir Starmer has been a lacklustre Leader of the Opposition thus far, but this time he scents blood. Boris Johnson must know that he cannot bluster or bamboozle his way out of this one. If he is wise, he will get it out in the open as quickly as possible, without excuses or equivocation. There is no point in complaining about how the video was leaked, almost certainly by someone at the company hired by the Government to run live broadcast briefings in a specially designed room modelled on the White House. The whole expensive plan was aborted.
Nevertheless, an inquiry will have to take place, not into the leaked video but into the year-long cover-up. The 30 people who attended the party in the press room, plus other staff who may have joined in later, will have questions to answer. What the public will want to know is: who authorised the party and who ordered those who attended to keep quiet? At what point did Boris get involved and to what extent? Why, after the story broke on November 30, did he repeatedly deny that the rules were broken?
At this point, honesty is the best policy. The PM should come clean and apologise. He hates apologies, rightly assuming that they merely whet the appetites of hostile media. But sometimes there is no alternative. If the public has been lied to, then its righteous indignation must be propitiated. Privy Counsellors are not referred to officially as “Right Honourable” for nothing. As a man of honour — which he is — Boris Johnson will know that he cannot be “economical with the actualité”, as the late Alan Clark — an extremely dodgy minister but a good diarist— memorably put it. Nothing less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth will do.
At the same time, we journalists should keep a sense of proportion. The Downing Street Christmas party should never have taken place, let alone been covered up, but it is not a hanging offence. The episode has damaged public trust in the legal basis of Covid rules and for that reason someone should take responsibility for it. The best person to do so is the one with the broadest shoulders: Boris.
But we are still fighting the pandemic and the only people who wish to wallow in recriminations are those who hope to gain political advantage from it. Voters will have a chance to register their anger at the North Shropshire by-election on December 16 — the “safe seat” vacated by Owen Paterson. If electors decide to teach the Conservatives a lesson next week, it will be no surprise. That lesson will be the oldest one that politicians somehow always seem to forget: whatever else you do, don’t lie to us. For if you do, you will live to regret it.
