Boris Johnson lied and should go now over ‘partygate’ as PM hides behind police inquiry – Andrew Vine

To see the man responsible for running the country stand up and effectively say of the parties that proliferated around him in 10 Downing Street – “Nothing to do with me, guv. It was all the fault of other people” – was breathtaking for its arrogance.

Boris Johnson humiliated by Sue Gray and Theresa May over ‘partygate’ and claim that he did not read or understand his lockdown laws – The Yorkshire Post says

The expressions of those alongside Boris Johnson spoke volumes. The way Rishi Sunak’s eyes darted about as he heard the statement. The way Priti Patel cast her glance downwards.

As Sue Gray’s report emerges, why Boris Johnson will never be forgiven for ‘partygate’ lies – Tom Richmond

If they could not quite believe how brazen and shameful an attempt this was to evade responsibility for the scandal of what happened at the heart of Government as the rest of the country obeyed lockdown rules, then how can the rest of us regard it with anything other than utter scorn?

There must be a touch of the delusional about him if he thinks that the public – and the MPs on the benches over his shoulder – will forget that before Christmas he solemnly informed the Commons that he knew nothing about parties and believed them to be work events.

What then of the party held in his own flat, identified in the truncated report by senior civil servant Sue Gray? Mr Johnson stands exposed as a man who has misled the Commons and the country, a Prime Minister unfit for office who exhibits an overweening self-confidence that he can do as he pleases and get away with it. A politician with any shred of decency, any regard for honest standards of behaviour, would accept that the game is up and bow out.

Not Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Where circumstances demand honour, he dissembles. Where they demand responsibility is taken for actions on his watch and in his own home, he instead offers bluster about Brexit and freeports.

In doing so, he demeans the office he holds and diminishes the standing of the Government he leads. He undermines democratic accountability and shreds public trust in politics.

Even in their emasculated form, Ms Gray’s findings expose a rotten culture in Mr Johnson’s Downing Street, citing a failure of leadership and a lack of thought about what the country was going through.

Whilst the people of Britain endured enforced separation from loved ones – and ministers trumpeted their approval of police crackdowns on lockdown transgressors – it was time to crack open the booze and have fun for some at the heart of Government.

There were 16 of what she terms “gatherings” – that’s “parties” to you and I, unencumbered by the restrained language of a civil servant at pains not to write anything that could prejudice a police investigation.

Even though it is early in 2022, Ms Gray’s finding that “some of the behaviour surrounding these gatherings is difficult to justify” must already be a strong candidate for understatement of the year.

Rather than “difficult to justify”, more appropriate labels for what went on might be “outrageous” or “demonstrated total contempt for tens of millions of law-abiding British people”.

It simply defies credibility that the Prime Minister had no idea what was going on, especially when there was a party in his own flat and he happily accepted a cake at a celebration for his birthday.

Shamefully, he continues to duck and dive, failing to commit to publishing Ms Gray’s report in full at some future date, and falling back on the old chestnut of not being able to say anything more pending the outcome of the criminal investigation into lockdown breaches by the Metropolitan Police.

What an extraordinary and disgraceful state of affairs it is that a serving Prime Minister should stoop so low as to hide behind a police investigation in an attempt to evade scrutiny.

All sense of probity has been lost from this premiership. The stain of what has happened cannot be wiped clean and the apology of sorts he offered the Commons was insincere and nothing more than an act of expediency.

Doubtless, in the days and weeks to come, people who work at Downing Street and the Cabinet Office will carry the can for what has happened, sacrificed to save their ultimate boss. That will not fool the public, who know all too well who is really responsible for what happens at number 10.

There is no fixing this Prime Minister, no mechanism for imposing honesty and decency on a nature to which such basic virtues appear alien. He won’t go of his own volition, however much the circumstances demand it. It

is now down to his own MPs to do the decent thing by the country and their party and move to depose Mr Johnson.

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