Friday 20 May 2022

Partygate: Justice must also be seen to be done

The prime minister seems to have escaped more fines on what must be minor technicalities after the metropolitan police said their investigation into partygate is complete with 126 fixed penalty notices issued and apparently only one for Johnson himself. Let me say I don’t know if the Met have been thorough and straightforward or been ‘got at,’ since the regulations were complex and changing all the time. However, a lot of people are upset that he gets away with attending the same parties that others were fined for.  It all looks quite rum to me and I'm sure it is far from the end of the legal part.

We have a case where there appears to be prima facie evidence that the British prime minister may have broken the law but he has been cleared in 5 out of the 6 incidents but we have no idea why.

The old adage about justice should not only be done but be seen to be done still holds good and I'm afraid we are in the dark about the biggest scandal in Downing Street for years. The Met are not going to publish their thinking so we will never be any the wiser - unless that is somebody asks for a judicial review which seems quite likely

Jolyon Maugham of The Good law Project, tweeted, "We are struggling to understand this and have instructed lawyers to write a further letter to the Metropolitan Police asking for an explanation. We will, of course, publish that letter."  So don't be surprised to find the police in court defending themselves.

Quite a few people are recalling a Sunday Times article from 24 April in which claimed, "Johnson has told friends he has been assured he will receive only one fine.” Now, they’re asking who gave that assurance. Don’t forget the Met department investigating partygate has the health secretary’s brother as the second in command. It all sounds very conspiratorial - and I’m not surprised eyebrows are being raised.

Andrew Marr on LBC has said historians will wonder how Boris Johnson survived Partygate as he questioned how the Prime Minister could have legally attended 'illegal' gatherings. He also says it is not over yet.

Assuming this is the police’s final say and there is no judicial review, we are left with the Sue Gray report and potentially disgruntled Downing Street employees who received FPNs (one person received 5 apparently) spilling the beans on the parties or other matters which might prove embarrassing to Johnson, although it’s not obvious to me that he ever feels embarrassed about anything.

Some staff are said to have been informed by email that their presence was ‘required’ at some of the events for which they were then later fined for attending, presumably on the basis that the meeting was not ‘reasonably necessary.’ I imagine there are some very unhappy people.

Pippa Crerrar, the journalist who first broke the story for The Mirror (She is joining The Guardian in summer as political editor) tweeted the news and finished by saying her DMs (Direct Messages) are open. I assume the reason she did this was in the expectation that at least one of the 82 other Downing Street staff who received a FPN will be in touch. And it appears at least one of them was. 

It seems Johnson was only investigated about two of the six events he attended, the Mirror are now reporting.

Some of the most perceptive comments have come from Adam Wagner, a human rights barrister who has followed the case in some detail. Wagner reminded us that Dominic Cummings once claimed junior civil servants had been assured by senior staff that the gatherings were legal. 

He surmises that in some strange way the PM has managed to attend 6 illegal gatherings but attended 5 of them legally!

He talks of "inconsistency" and on the surface he has a point, however, later, after The Mirror published its story, he tweeted:

So, this apparently leaves only one other event for which he wasn't fined and the mystery of why the other four were not even investigated at all.

And according to Wagner, he says the questionnaires sent out by the Met didn’t ask who else attended the event and so it seems they were relying on photographic evidence only of which people attended which parties/gatherings. He asks:

“how do you spend £450k on an investigation that doesn’t ask the PM whether he was at 4 of 6 illegal gatherings? And why didn’t questionnaires ask who else was at gatherings (as far as I have seen)?

Not everyone on the Tory side has welcomed the result. The founder of ConservativeHome Tim Montgomerie tweeted:

It now looks as if the next hurdle for Johnson will be the misleading of parliament. This blog post by the lawyer David Allen Green contains some useful information about how ministers who ‘knowingly’ mislead the House are expected to resign. He may argue he didn’t mislead knowingly but there is also the fact that ministers are expected to correct “any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.” Thus, it is not sufficient for the PM to say that he did not “knowingly” mislead since he knew in January that Sue Gray intended to refer the whole issue to the police and should have corrected the record then..

The BBC’s take on it is HERE. Daniel Sandford tries to fathom why others were fined while the PM wasn’t but in the end admits he doesn’t know but says if any fines are not paid, the case could go to court and the police may then have to explain how they arrived at their decision.

If anyone who received a FPN decides to fight it, the police may be forced to show their workings.

Many are expressing amazement that he hasn't resigned already after presiding over widespread criminality and law breaking in Downing Street and telling Parliament he knew nothing about it. Any prime minister with an ounce of integrity would have resigned months ago.

Johnson as we know, corrupts everything he comes into contact with and while the metropolitan police is not, as we know, above criticism as far as being corrupt is concerned, he has destroyed what little was left of their reputation for integrity and probity.

If the Met are found to have acted wrongly or in collusion with Downing Street or the Home Office it will confirm the United Kingdom as a banana republic.

Can the nation take any more Johnsonism?

Posted by at