Friday 20 May 2022 10:10 AM DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Such a sweeping affront to our liberties must never happen ... trends now
You could almost hear the piteous wails of grief ringing across the newsrooms of the BBC and Guardian. That strangely rhythmic, thudding sound? Could it have been those two mad professors Dominic Cummings and ITV’s Robert Peston banging their heads on their desks in exasperation?
And the high priests of lockdown from SAGE and beyond must have ground their teeth so ferociously that the nation’s dentists should be rubbing their hands with glee.
Our thoughts are with them all at this difficult and distressing time.
For at precisely 10.43am yesterday, the massed ranks of Boris-haters discovered that months of hysteria, hyperbole and confected rage had come to nothing.
The Partygate inquiry was over and it had ended with a whimper rather than the bang they had longed for. Their desperate ploy to unseat the Prime Minister had failed.
After an entirely pointless Scotland Yard investigation, lasting four months, involving 12 detectives and costing an eye-popping £460,000, Boris Johnson received just one paltry fine.
Even that was a travesty. Two months after he almost died from Covid, No 10 colleagues surprised him with a birthday cake between work meetings in the Cabinet room.
The Partygate inquiry was over and it had ended with a whimper rather than the bang they had longed for. Their desperate ploy to unseat the Prime Minister had failed. After an entirely pointless Scotland Yard investigation, lasting four months, involving 12 detectives and costing an eye-popping £460,000, Boris Johnson received just one paltry fine
Two months after he almost died from Covid, No 10 colleagues surprised him with a birthday cake between work meetings in the Cabinet room. Boris was there for just nine minutes. His then fiancée, Carrie, carrying their baby boy in her arms, was there for less than five. Pictured: Mr Johnson poses with a cake at a school in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire on June 19, 2020
Boris was there for just nine minutes. His then fiancée, Carrie, carrying their baby boy in her arms, was there for less than five.
The cake never left its Tupperware box and no drink was taken. Yet not only was Mr Johnson hit with a £50 penalty for breaching lockdown rules, but so was his Chancellor.
Rishi Sunak’s crime was to have arrived early for his meeting and joined in an impromptu chorus of Happy Birthday for his boss. What on earth was he supposed to do? Run off and call 999?
This whole saga has been farcical. Yes, they made the rules and we are now told this was a technical breach. But the idea that this was, in any sense, a party is preposterous.
Rishi Sunak’s crime was to have arrived early for his meeting and joined in an impromptu chorus of Happy Birthday for his boss. What on earth was he supposed to do? Run off and call 999?
And the notion there was some deliberate, sustained and contemptuous flouting of restrictions — as Labour would have us believe —equally so.
At the time, Mr Johnson and his staff were engaged in a round-the-clock battle against the worst global health emergency in a century.
While the rest of Britain was working (or not!) from home, they were at their desks in Downing Street trying to save lives and protect the NHS.
They were toiling together in necessarily close proximity. Who would begrudge them some food and a drink at the end of a tough and deeply stressful day?
As the PM has consistently said, they did not believe — and were not advised by senior civil servants — that they were doing anything wrong.
There were exemptions from lockdown rules for those in a ‘work bubble’ and they assumed that on this basis their gatherings were above board. That they were apparently mistaken shows how baffling and draconian the rules were.
Just ask Sir Keir Starmer. With puce-faced piety, Labour’s leader has characterised Mr Johnson as the ringmaster of an endless circus of drunken revelry at the heart of government.
More than anyone, he put the bellows under this sorry affair, openly branding the Prime Minister a liar and charlatan who had stuck two fingers up to the British public. By contrast, he painted himself as a paragon — a man of unimpeachable integrity.
How hollow and hubristic he looks today. With Durham police investigating his own glaring Covid breach, his moral high horse has reared up and thrown him off. Indeed, his rule-breaking ‘Beergate’ party
