With his lies and hypocrisy, the prime minister has corrupted and degraded the Tory party from the highest office
A little over a month ago, the prime minister told the House of Commons that he shared the anger of a nation at seeing a video of his Number 10 staff making light of lockdown measures and joking about Christmas parties. We were supposed to believe that a culture of impunity and disregard for rules at the heart of government had absolutely nothing to do with Boris Johnson; that he was as shocked by the hypocrisy as the rest of us. It was always a ludicrous contention that the prime minister had no idea what was going on in his own office, part of the same complex as his own residence. And in the last week the full extent of the sheer gall of a leader prepared to throw his staff under a bus to evade accountability for the worst sort of political hypocrisy has been exposed.
Revelation after revelation has emerged since the start of the year – as Johnson must have known they inevitably would – that rubbishes that statement he made to MPs last month. We now know that in May 2020, Johnson was giving a speech at a social gathering, with drink and food, in the Downing Street garden the very same evening ministers were warning the public at a press conference that they could only meet one other person outside. That his staff were throwing not one, but two, raucous parties that reportedly left items in the garden damaged the night before Prince Philip’s funeral. And that Downing Street staff regularly held drinks parties on Fridays that Johnson would often drop into, giving them the prime ministerial seal of approval.
