When staff sang Boris Johnson Happy Birthday in No10, pubs, beauty salons, campsites, many school classes, cafes and canteens were all shut by law.
It was illegal to meet anyone from another household socially indoors.
Outdoors the rule of six had only been made legal 18 days earlier.
Even when churches finally opened 15 days later, singing remained banned.
Worshippers were told one person could sing in a whole church if it was “essential to an act of worship” - but only behind a plexiglass screen that could be “easily cleaned”.
To many, even those rightly worried about deadly Covid, these laws seemed absurd and Orwellian.
But they were set by Boris Johnson - the same man who has now been fined £50 by police for breaking them after months of denials, and refuses to resign.
After visiting a school in the morning the Prime Minister was ushered into Downing Street’s grand Cabinet room just after 2pm on 19 June 2020, the day of his 56th birthday.
Two months after he almost died of Covid, his wife Carrie was there with their baby Wilf in her arms.
She was alongside staff who apparently laid M&S sausage rolls and chocolate bites on the famous lozenge-shaped table.
The PM’s £100,000-a-year taxpayer-funded vanity photographer Andrew Parsons took a photo of him holding an Estrella beer, apparently in a toast, and he left within 10 minutes.
That photo may have been the undoing of Boris Johnson.
As the Mirror revealed, it ended up in the hands of Whitehall enforcer Sue Gray - so, in turn, the Met Police.
Also in the frame, literally, was Rishi Sunak holding a soft drink.
The Chancellor’s team claim he wandered into the room for a different meeting then joined in to offer the PM his best wishes.
Lulu Lytle, the interior designer behind lavish renovations of the Downing Street flat, also briefly attended.
Allies of the Prime Minister have since insisted there was only an “unopened four-pack” of “warm” beer.
Behind the scenes, those allies were last night furiously trying to downplay the scale of the event - all while Boris Johnson was offering a “full apology” to the nation on TV from his lavish Chequers retreat.
One ally, Conor Burns, infamously claimed in January that the Prime Minister was “ambushed with a cake”.
After he was ridiculed, it’s understood Boris Johnson privately told MPs there was in fact no cake at all.
Perhaps it’s Schrodinger’s cake - at once existing and not existing.
While one source told The Sun last night “there was no cake” and the PM ate a salad, another told the Daily Mail there was a cake but it was kept in its tupperware box.
All the while The Times - which reported the party the day after it happened - proclaimed at the time: “A group of aides sang him Happy Birthday before they tucked into a Union Jack cake.”
More cynical Westminster insiders suspect No10 of stoking a row about cake in order to trivialise the issue.
After repeatedly claiming all rules were followed, last night Boris Johnson offered a “full apology”.
But clutching a prepared statement in Chequers, he again sought to pass the blame to his staff.
“Downing Street is about, you know, 15,000 square feet,” he complained.
“It's got a lot of officials working in it, hundreds and hundreds of officials.
“I couldn't be everywhere at once.”
For now, Tory MPs have held back on calling for him to quit - mostly, at least.
The fact it’s one of the shorter, more trivial events getting fines for now can only help the Prime Minister.
But that doesn’t mean he’s out of the woods yet. The Met are still investigating five other events Boris Johnson has been at, and the PM admits there could be more fines to come.
The Prime Minister, in as many words, urged people to move on from the row last night.
He strangely claimed that becoming the first PM to be fined for breaking the law had given him an "even greater sense of obligation" to deliver his manifesto vow of "levelling up across the whole of the UK”.
But for many, moving on is impossible.
Louise Dillon, who lost her son Fred to leukaemia aged 14 in May 2020, tweeted a poignant photo of Happy Birthday bunting above a hospital bed strewn with wires and tubes.
“This ‘it was just a cake for 10 minutes’ line has to stop,” she wrote.
“This was Fred’s 14th birthday. His brother, his friends weren’t allowed to ‘pop in’. My husband was allowed to be with us, for the first time in over a week. Fred died a week later.
“Can no one see how callous and tone deaf this defence is.
“The fact that MPs are still trotting this our is unforgivable and shows exactly the contempt they have for the sacrifices others have made.”
