When Aaron Bell attended his grandmother’s funeral, he could not allow himself to hug his grieving parents and siblings.
After she was laid to rest with only 10 mourners present, in accordance with Covid regulations, he turned around and drove the three hours home without stopping for a cup of tea, because those were the rules and in a pandemic they were to be obeyed. His question to Boris Johnson on Monday afternoon was couched in tones of barely suppressed fury: “Does the prime minister think I’m a fool?”
It’s the guilt, as Keir Starmer had rightly noted earlier in an extraordinarily emotionally charged afternoon in parliament, that for many people is the heartbreaker: the gut-wrenching feeling that if the man who made the Covid laws simply ignored them when it suited him, then maybe they, too, should have defied the rules to be with their loved ones as they died. Great leaders inspire us to be better people, but somehow Britain has ended up instead with a leader who makes people actively regret doing the right and selfless thing. It’s a point Aaron Bell could have been invented to illustrate, if it weren’t for the fact that Aaron Bell is the very real Conservative (and, yes, you read that right) MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme.
When it finally emerged on Monday afternoon, handed over with all the ceremony of tablets of stone descending a mountain, Sue Gray’s report seemed initially like the dampest of squibs. Stripped of all the interesting bits, in response to last-minute concerns from the Metropolitan police about it compromising their even more last-minute inquiry, it could hardly have been otherwise. Yet even her deliberately terse account of 16 – 16, for heaven’s sake! – lockdown gatherings noted that a whopping 12 of them met Scotland Yard’s threshold for investigation, including a party in Boris and Carrie Johnson’s private Downing Street flat on the night Dominic Cummings quit and the “bring a bottle” garden drinks we know that Johnson himself attended in May 2020, the month Bell went to that funeral.
It is now overwhelmingly clear that the prime minister told parliament that no lockdown rules were broken in Downing Street when that was untrue. He lied to parliament, a resigning offence, and is now under police investigation for breaking the Covid laws he imposed on everyone else, to boot. “We must look ourselves in the mirror and learn,” Johnson solemnly declared, before disclosing that what he had personally seen was that someone else should be blamed. There will be a structural reform of the Whitehall machine, offering convenient cover for disposing of senior civil servants whose positions may look untenable after the police investigation, which can simultaneously be sold to MPs as “getting a grip” on a dysfunctional No 10 machine. Given its dysfunctionality comes directly from Johnson himself, the only possible response is: does he really think his own party is that stupid?
His predecessor certainly wasn’t fooled. Theresa May, in a moment that felt as if it had been a long time coming, inquired icily whether the man who forced her out of office had failed to read his own rules, failed to understand them, or simply decided they didn’t apply to him, in a manner suggesting she felt all three were plausible. Her public denunciation, alongside that of Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, suggests that what remains of the old school one nation Conservative party – the moderate rump who always had their reservations about Johnson, as distinct from those Brexiters who have only recently turned on him and newer “red wallers” such as Bell – is getting organised. Since only his own MPs can depose a leader with Johnson’s majority, everything now rests on the sizeable number who claimed to be “waiting for Sue Gray” as a way of putting off the painful decision to unseat a sitting leader with little clarity about who or what might succeed him.
In every coup there is always a core of MPs arguing that they just need to wait until after the local elections, or after the budget, or after anything else that seems reassuringly far away. For some, “waiting for Sue Gray” could all too easily evolve into “waiting for Sue Gray’s full report”, which could be months away, on the other side of a police investigation. The country, however, has waited more than long enough.
What little Gray could say about all the parties she wasn’t allowed to write about – that there had been a “serious failure to observe” not just the high standards rightly expected of government but the basics expected of absolutely everyone else in a pandemic, plus “failures of leadership and judgment” in both No 10 and the Cabinet Office – merely confirmed the bleeding obvious, and yet that’s more than bad enough. Downing Street’s immediate answer to all this will be an unconvincing flurry of prime ministerial activity – touring eastern Europe, publishing a “levelling up” white paper – meant to portray him as irreplaceable. But it’s hard to reconcile this fantasy of an industrious statesman with stories about his red box lying unopened for a day outside the Downing Street flat at weekends, like a dirty breakfast tray abandoned outside a hotel room door, and with the lack of a serious long-term purpose that has left Whitehall departments and parliament alike with too much time on their hands.
The only real strategy seems to be to trudge on deeper into the mire in the hope that everyone somehow gets used to being covered in muck; that we somehow forget how outrageous it is that Johnson seems to believe he can just carry on regardless, how bizarre that there should be no formal mechanism of impeachment for dishonesty, how enraging that we are all expected just to tolerate this degree of moral squalor at the heart of government for as long as his own party chooses to stomach it.
It’s true, as Johnson’s allies say, that some voters are getting bored of hearing about parties when they face bigger problems in their daily lives. But a leader who seemingly can’t even control what happens under his own roof lacks the credibility to solve those problems, and sooner or later they will surely realise it. Until now, the most succinct summary of the situation has been the former cabinet minister David Davis’s call for Boris Johnson to “in the name of God, go”. But Aaron Bell has added another. Are those who hold Johnson’s fate in their hands really this willing to be taken for fools?
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
