BRENDAN O’NEILL: Partygate’s true scandal is that Boris Johnson, a man elected by the many, has been hounded by the few
The irony is so delicious, you can almost taste it. As the Mail reported yesterday, Sir Bernard Jenkin – a member of the privileges committee that sat in judgment on Boris Johnson for attending parties during lockdown – now himself faces a criminal investigation for allegedly doing the same.
Amid evidence of a ‘serious and flagrant breach’ of Covid rules, Scotland Yard has opened a probe into widespread claims that the Tory MP attended a boozy social shindig – in Parliament – on December 8, 2020.
Mail readers well know by now that this event was a 65th birthday bash for Jenkin’s wife at which social distancing allegedly ‘went out the window’. One MP who was present has already apologised for her ill-advised attendance.
As I say, a delicious irony. Yet this is only the latest tortuous twist in the long-running saga of Partygate – and the strange and vindictive treatment of the former PM.
With impeccable timing, just as one of Boris’s key accusers finds himself subject to a police probe, the cops also say they won’t be probing claims that he broke the rules at other events at No 10 and Chequers.
Boris Johnson was put into power with a thumping mandate in December 2019 was ejected just two-and-a-half years later – without a single public vote being cast
The ‘series of gatherings’ during 2020 and 2021 ‘do not meet the retrospective criteria for opening an investigation,’ officers insist.
Only one cliche will do here. You couldn’t make it up.
A PM put into power with a thumping mandate in December 2019 was ejected just two-and-a-half years later – without a single public vote being cast – and, we now see, on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Anointed by the people, he was dethroned by a self-appointed star chamber of Brexit-bashing MPs, a public broadcaster that whipped up a non-story into the greatest scandal of the age and a biased committee that was stuffed to the gills with his own political enemies.
Cast your mind back to the start of the pandemic.
Boris very nearly died. For several terrifying days in April 2020, he was in intensive care as doctors reportedly debated puncturing a hole in his neck to help him breathe.
Yet he recovered – and swiftly returned to work, where the first thing he did was pay a moving tribute to the NHS staff who saved his life.
I believe that this brush with mortality was crucial: it manifestly affected his approach to the virus. From then on, he understood how devastating it could be – and he never underestimated it.
Sir Bernard Jenkin – a member of the privileges committee that sat in judgment on Boris Johnson for attending parties during lockdown – now himself faces a criminal investigation for allegedly doing the same.
When he wasn’t working, he was recuperating, not partying.
No wonder that just eight months after coming out of hospital, Boris was hailing the rollout of the vaccines, a world-leading programme made possible thanks to the wise early decision to throw everything at developing an effective, cheap –and British – jab.
Rather than follow the sluggish and bureaucratic European model, Boris green-lit UK regulators to work in parallel with private-sector scientists, under the inspired leadership of the now-Dame Kate Bingham.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was the result – and how many people are alive today because of it?
Along with getting Brexit done and taking early and unflinching leadership of the Ukraine crisis, history will remember the vaccine as one of Boris’s greatest achievements. So there is something genuinely sinister in the chattering-classes’ effort to portray him as nothing more than a lockdown miscreant.
We are forgetting the fact that Boris knows better than most of us what a terrible toll Covid can take on the human body.
Moreover, the specific misdemeanour for which he received a fixed penalty is, frankly, baffling.
Attending what appeared to be his own impromptu birthday party in June 2020 – not long after he nearly died – is hardly the hedonistic rave that his critics imagine. After all, Rishi Sunak was fined for the same offence, yet the serving PM attracts barely a fraction of the vitriol that Boris suffers.
Just eight months after coming out of hospital, Boris was hailing the rollout of the vaccines
As PM, Boris repeatedly apologised as soon as he discovered the truth about the party, even correcting his record in the Commons. Yet nothing short of the guillotine would satisfy his critics.
Enter Sue Gray – from stage-left. The then-senior civil servant conducted the first Partygate probe – but now, of course, she appears to have had Labour sympathies all along.
Imminently to commence her tenure as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, this week the supposedly irreproachable Ms Gray was found to have broken civil-service rules by chatting to the Labour leader about this highly political position four long months before leaving her senior role in Whitehall.
Putting this shameless Leftie in charge of investigating Boris’s parties was like inviting a foxhound to sit in judgment on a fox. In retrospect, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Gray might have relished the opportunity to fell one of the Tory’s party’s best electoral assets: Boris had conquered Labour’s Red Wall and millions of working-class votes had swept him to power.
Yet still the madness went on.
The privileges committee, authorised to investigate Boris over Partygate by a motion of the House of Commons on 21 April 2022, was even more bizarre.
Not only did it include the aforementioned Sir Bernard and other Boris-sceptical Tories, it was headed by Labour grandee Harriet Harman.
This is the woman who, just two months before she was appointed to chair the Partygate committee in June last year, had shared a blog post by the Blairite war propagandist Alastair Campbell – that paragon of truth and honesty – describing Boris as a ‘lying charlatan’.
Then-senior civil servant Sue Gray conducted the first Partygate probe – but now, of course, she appears to have had Labour sympathies all along
Boris, said the high-minded Campbell, lied ‘repeatedly’ about lockdown parties and deserves ‘to be swept away’.
In enthusiastically sharing this infantile attack, Harman was clearly signalling her agreement with it. And yet just a few weeks later, she was put in charge of judging Boris’s behaviour with her fellow courtroom marsupials. I am confident that in years to come, people will recognise that the true affront to the morals and principles of this nation was never Partygate itself.
It was the weaponisation of this by the enemies of Boris and Brexit that will forever stick in the craw.
That is the fundamental truth about Partygate. It was a scandal stoked by partisans. It was a scandal that allowed obvious Boris-loathers to decide his fate. It was a scandal that empowered unaccountable media elites and puffed-up delegations to chase from power a man voted for by millions of decent working people.
If a banana republic were to install a partisan committee that then chased from Parliament a democratically elected politician, Britain would loudly tut-tut – and say democracy must be respected.
And yet it happened here.
We allowed a man elected by the many to be hounded out by the few.
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