Tuesday 24 May 2022

Has the piglet finally run out of grease?

Any sense of relief felt in Downing Street after the Met decided not to issue the prime minister with any further Fixed Penalty Notices (FPN) has quickly evaporated. As expected, photographs quickly emerged showing Johnson on 13 November 2020 at what looks for all the world like a boozy leaving party for his press secretary Lee Cain. There are tables loaded with bottles of wine and spirits, and glasses raised to a toast, apparently proposed by the man who was urging the public to abide by strict lockdown rules in force at the time.

The images were given to Paul Brand at ITV who tweeted:

It is hard to imagine he can now claim NOT to have misled MPs by telling them there were no parties and strict rules were followed at all times.

To add to the ever expanding scandal, this morning The Times publish claims that during the ‘secret’ meeting between the prime minister and Sue Gray in early May, Johnson called for her report to be effectively dropped on the grounds that all the details were now known anyway.

Some 'anonymous sources' are quoted:

“Two Whitehall sources said the prime minister suggested that Gray did not need to publish her full report, given the investigation by Scotland Yard. ‘He asked her is there much point in doing it now that it’s all out there,” a source said. “He was inferring that she didn’t need to publish the report.’

"Another insider said: ‘They were exploring this idea of not having any report. It was being talked about [in Downing Street]. But politically they realised they couldn’t do it’.”

This is the meeting Downing Street first said was initiated by Ms Gray and even sent out the chief secretary to The Treasury yesterday to repeat the claim only to admit later that it wasn’t true. An official in The Cabinet Office is said to have arranged it - presumably on their own initiative and unknown to Johnson? If you believe that you’ll believe anything.

"The Times has been told that it was organised at the request of Samantha Jones, the permanent secretary at No 10. Johnson was said to be “apoplectic” about a report in The Times suggesting that Gray would criticise him for the culture in No 10 and his attendance at events.

"It was suggested that the meeting was instigated after a report in this newspaper implied that Gray’s findings were so damaging that Johnson could be left with no choice but to quit."

This is a serious charge but very plausible. Johnson and his supporters have always said Gray’s report is independent and he will accept her findings and when news of his meeting with her was leaked, Downing Street said the contents of the report weren’t discussed. Perhaps not, but asking her to drop it altogether is much worse.

I take it that both the new images and The Times’ claims are both the result of disgruntled civil servants who are unhappy at being scapegoated for partygate and want Johnson out. If I had been invited to Lee Cain’s leaving do only to receive a Fixed Penalty Notice while others far more senior, including the very top banana, get away Scot free I think I would be a bit miffed too.

The party pictures also ramp up the pressure on the Met to explain why Johnson wasn't fined while others were. Tristan Kirk, the courts correspondent for The London Evening Standard, tweeted about an event very similar to the one shown in the images:

And it isn't just the party attendees who are upset. Gray too, is said to be aggrieved. The Times suggests she was angered after the Guido Fawkes website published a picture of her with Baroness (Tessa) Jowell, a former Labour cabinet minister who died of brain cancer in 2018. A friend of Gray's said, “They published a picture of her with her son and Tessa Jowell and they are trying to make out that she’s a Labour person and it’s absolute crap.”

I an afraid the PM is just making more and more enemies.  I think this is all starting to look terminal for Johnson. It's reminiscent of Richard Nixon and Watergate, which dragged on for months as Nixon at first denied all knowledge and more and more evidence kept coming out until he was forced from office with his reputation in tatters.

What we already know about partygate would normally result in wholesale resignations but Johnson has raised the bar so high that short of extremely serious criminal activity caught on camera he is not going to resign under any conceivable circumstances.  The party elected him and will have to remove him.

Everything he touches becomes sullied or tainted. By his constant lies he has brought Eton and Oxford into disrepute, dragged the Tory party into the gutter, destroyed any respect anyone had for parliament, damaged the reputation of the civil service and is in the process of implicating the metropolitan police in a cover-up.

Even Daily Mail readers are fed up with it all:

When Paul Dacre and the Tory party begin to see what a liability he has become you can bet he will be gone.

The greased piglet has finally run out of grease.

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