Boris Johnson has said that he regrets apologising over the Partygate scandal when it first broke.
In his upcoming memoir, Unleashed, the former Prime Minister writes that he made a “mistake” in offering a “pathetic” and “grovelling” apology for the row which “made it look as though we were far more culpable than we were”.
Multiple parties were held in Downing Street in breach of Covid regulations during the pandemic. The revelations caused public outrage and contributed significantly to Mr Johnson’s eventual resignation as Prime Minister in July 2022.
Mr Johnson also became the first Prime Minister to receive a criminal penalty while in office, over Partygate, when he, his wife and then-chancellor Rishi Sunak received £50 fixed-penalty notices from Scotland Yard for attending the bash.
In an interview with ITV News, Mr Johnson claimed the move had “inadvertently validated the entire corpus” as accusations were also levelled at officials who were “working very hard”.
He said: “What I was trying to say there was, I think that the blanket apology – the sort of apology I issued right at the beginning – I think the trouble with it was that afterwards, all the accusations that then rained down on officials who’d been working very hard in Number 10 and elsewhere were thought to be true.
“And by apologising I had sort of inadvertently validated the entire corpus and it wasn’t fair on those people.”
Asked whether he regretted apologising to the late Queen for parties held on the eve of Prince Philip's funeral, he said: “I don’t discuss my conversations with the Queen.”
Mr Johnson also told the broadcaster that he did not think officials involved in the scandal “thought they were setting out to break the rules”.
He went on: “I really don’t think that those officials thought that they were setting out to break the rules… they were working round the clock and they thought they were within the framework.”
Pressed on whether he understood the scale of public anger, he said: “Of course I understand it and you can’t say that I haven’t been exposed over the last few years to the full force of people’s anger and indignation.”
