It was always going to be a high-risk strategy to summon Martin Reynolds to give evidence to the Covid inquiry first thing on a Monday morning. Boris Johnson’s former permanent private secretary may look every inch the unassuming senior civil servant in his crisp grey suit, but scratch the surface and there’s a total beast lurking. “Party Marty”. The “Karaoke King”. The last man standing on any dancefloor. One pill makes him larger, one pill makes him small. And the ones his mother gives him don’t do anything at all. The only good weekend is a lost weekend.
But Party Marty just about made it to the witness box in time to mumble his name and take the oath. It helps to have partied hard if there’s a great deal you would rather forget. If you can remember what happened in No 10 during lockdown then you probably weren’t there. The lead counsel for the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC, wasn’t in a particularly forgiving mood. Time and again he had to prevent his witness from rambling incoherently. No wonder the session went well over the time allotted to it.
Keith began with a few generalities. Emails and WhatsApps. Had Reynolds heard of them? Vaguely. Though he wasn’t entirely sure of the difference between them. So could he explain why he had activated the “Disappear” function on the messages of one of his WhatsApp groups? Party Marty shook his head. It was all a long time ago. A bit much to ask him now. A better question might be why he hadn’t made all the messages disappear from his other chats. Though he guessed it was because he had imagined everything in the group was so mind-numbingly dull. He had done the inquiry a favour by saving it the trouble of reading so much nonsense
“Er … I guess I thought that something that had been disappeared could be recovered,” Party Marty said unconvincingly. Or words to that effect. He wasn’t the most credible of witnesses. There again, you wouldn’t expect anything else of a man who had been hand-picked for the job by Johnson. Let’s face it, Boris has never chosen anyone because they were good at anything. Rather, he chose them because they weren’t. They were the type not to ask awkward questions. But give me a break, sobbed Reynolds. At least he handed over his messages. More than could be said for Rishi Sunak.
Talk me through your normal day in No 10, Keith demanded. Oooh, that was tricky. Mostly Party Marty would try to cut and paste some key Covid highlights into a morning email that Johnson would not then read. Then he would go back to making sure Downing Street was equipped with the right-sized paperclips – he wasn’t much interested in that weird, fatal epidemic thingy, which in any case was way above his pay grade – and then he would go back to his side hustle in party planning. If Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, wanted someone to organise an end-of-trial rave then he could offer mates rates.
Here was the thing. Party Marty was just a time server. Someone who had been promoted well above his level of competence. It wasn’t his job to question people like the prime minister, Dominic Cummings or the cabinet secretary, Simon Case. So he never bothered to form a view of what level of crisis Downing Street was in at any time. It was enough to know that the sense of crisis was permanent.
Of course it was. How could it be otherwise with Johnson in charge? Everyone knew that the man was a chaotic halfwit who needed to be spoon-fed everything. And even then he’d change his mind several times over the course of a day. So understandably nothing ever really happened and it felt as if we were without any form of government during the first year or so of the pandemic.
But don’t blame him. He hadn’t elected a serial liar and narcissistic sociopath as prime minister. The country had done that, so the country had got what it deserved. Blame Rishi and Matt Hancock too, if you like. They had also tried to fool the punters that the government could aspire to a basic level of competence that was clearly well out of its grasp. But Party Marty was just the monkey. Doing the danse macabre. To be fair, he had a point. It also wasn’t his fault he was no good at his job. Or thought he had been employed to do a different one entirely. The prime minister’s social secretary.
Keith wondered if there hadn’t been any number of occasions in early 2020 when it should have been apparent to even the average idiot that the government was completely unprepared for the pandemic. Reynolds interrupted. The inquiry had to remember he was not an average idiot. He was much further along the idiot spectrum than that. Now he was going to get technical. The quantum theory of disaster. The problem wasn’t that the government couldn’t deal with a crisis. It was just that the crisis was the wrong sort of crisis. One that didn’t respond to chaos.
What about the five Cobra meetings Johnson had missed? No. Party Marty hadn’t seen anything odd in that. What about the time Johnson had rushed off to a meeting with Evgeny Lebedev in the middle of a crisis? You couldn’t expect the normal channels of patronage to be suspended. And those 10 days in February when Johnson had literally done nothing when holed up at Chequers? Perfectly normal. How else was the prime minister meant to start his book on Shakespeare? In Martyworld there is nothing that can’t be explained away.
Finally we got to the parties themselves. Here Marty turned out to be unexpectedly coy and monosyllabic. This should have been his finest hour. Bring Your Own Booze. Throw up in the garden. Have sex on the swing. Anything goes. No desire goes unrequited in his and Johnson’s Downing Street. Come and tell it as it is. Britain may have been in lockdown but there was some corner of No 10 that was forever Merrie England. For tomorrow we die. Honestly, it was amazing that any of us survived.
Party Marty was reduced to a murmur. He was very sorry. Mostly for getting caught. After all, he nearly got away with it. Try to look on the bright side. All Tomorrow’s Parties.
OK, said Keith. One more thing. Could he remember Johnson making disparaging remarks about long Covid? Reynolds shrugged. Hadn’t counsel been listening. It was all a bit of a haze. Purple haze. Of course he couldn’t remember anything. He had a brand to protect.
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, pre-order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
