Why Boris Johnson must resign over Downing Street’s boozy lockdown parties and contempt for Covid families – Tom Richmond

I don’t, however, have any over the Prime Minister’s serial dishonesty – and which diminishes his office even further with each new lie or revelation.

The dangerous hypocrisy of Downing Street’s party scandal - The Yorkshire Post says

First, Downing Street was not designed, with its nooks and crannies, to be the seat of government, and also a premier’s office and home, in the 21st century – never mind a global health emergency like Covid. It’s a museum piece.

Second, the PM should use the gardens – he’d been fighting for his life weeks earlier after catching Covid and his partner Carrie, his then fiancée and now his wife, had recently given birth to their baby son Wilf. It’s not easy when the relentless demands of the job deny precious family time.

Thirdly, Johnson is unfortunate that his then aide, Dominic Cummings, is on a one-man revenge mission to end his premiership – the two Downing Street gatherings that took place in May 2020 as the PM was threatening to “increase the fines” for lockdown lawbreakers came, I note, days before reports emerged about Cummings making that fateful trip to Barnard Castle.

Finally, I doubt Johnson even knew that Martin Reynolds, his principal private secretary, had emailed 100 staff inviting them to “socially distanced drinks” on May 20 2020. I suspect Reynolds was thinking of the morale of an exhausted Downing Street team and should have rescinded the ‘‘bring your own booze’’ invite when some staff ventured that the gathering breached the lockdown laws that they were expecting the rest of Britain to follow.

But this is now tempered by Johnson’s contemptible smirk when he first asked on Monday about the party – it was as if the PM was laughing at the country – followed by his no-show in the Commons on Tuesday and then his apology at Prime Minister’s Questions, and claim that the party was “a work event”, after misleading MPs last month when he implied that Downing Street followed lockdown rules at all times in the pandemic.

Then I thought back to May 2020 and a near-neighbour denied access to her centenarian husband in a care home who later died of Covid; a dear friend only allowed a handful of people at their funeral and my own anguish at not being able to visit my recently-widowed father because it was against the rules reiterated by a Downing Street briefing minutes before the May 20 soirée.

And then my regretful decision not to travel to Exeter last month for the funeral of a dear friend, who probably did more for my career than anyone else, because I did not want to put myself or anyone else at risk during the Omicron variant. All this – and I’m one of the lucky ones compared to a great many – while Downing Street proves incapable of responding, truthfully and promptly, to allegations about serial rule-breaking as Sue Gray, the senior civil servant supposed to be overseeing levelling up, continues her inquiries.

As such, there’s only one man to blame for this: Boris Johnson, the prime minister who becomes more socially distant from honesty and integrity with every falsehood and whose continuing presence in Downing Street is now a hindrance to the country’s recovery from Covid and good governance.

The man who wrote in his own Ministerial Code in August 2020 that “the precious principles of public life enshrined in this document – integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership in the public interest – must be honoured at all times” is clearly incapable of following such a moral compass because of a propensity, in most aspects of his life in the media and politics, to bend the truth if it suits his own interests.

No wonder so few people in Whitehall leave office or even apologise when their conduct falls short of the standards expected of them – why should they when this premier sets such a rotten example from the funding of his flat refurbishment to lockdown rule breaking, misguided support for a colleague guilty of breaching lobbying laws and myriad broken promises to the North on levelling up?

And that a Minister of the Crown – Michael Ellis, himself a former law officer – did not give a straight answer on Tuesday when asked by senior backbencher Ben Bradshaw ‘‘If the Prime Minister broke the law, he will resign, won’t he?’’ spoke volumes.

But the fact of the matter is that families will neither forgive nor forget the fact that Boris Johnson for his lack of candour, at the outset, about ‘‘partygate’’ and, instead, his persistence in deceiving Parliament, a prima facie resignation issue. He is not the solution, he is the problem, and the longer he stays in office, lurching from one scandal to another, simply diminishes him, his office and his country. PM, the party is over.

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Tom Richmond is Comment Editor of The Yorkshire Post. He tweets via OpinionYP.

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