Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak cannot continue in their jobs, grieving relatives of Covid victims have said, after it emerged they had received fixed-penalty notices for breaching the lockdown restrictions they imposed on the UK during the pandemic.
Several people who lost loved ones said they were “disgusted” with the prime minister, after Downing Street said on Tuesday he was among those penalised.
“I just can’t see how he can continue to cling on to power,” said Jean Adamson, whose father, Aldrick, died two years ago on Friday. She said that, while Johnson had been attending lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street, her father “died on his own, on a cold Covid ward without anyone there to hold his hand” because she and her family had followed the rules.
“If [Johnson] had any decency or any integrity, then he would have gone,” Adamson said. “He would have gone a long time ago. But, clearly, we have a prime minister here who is self-serving, who is interested in himself and saving his own skin.”
Describing her father as a man who had worked hard all his life after arriving in the UK from Barbados aged 19 as a Windrush pioneer, Adamson spoke of her distress at the fact he had not received the funeral he would have wanted.
She said her father was a “man of the church” who sang in the choir, as well as serenading his grandchildren and great-grandchildren with West Indian songs, adding: “He was very contented, very cheerful and a robust character; a real pleasure to be around.”
She accused Johnson of being “devoid of all integrity”. She said: “I am disgusted. It’s a disgrace that we have a prime minister who, clearly, is not fit for office.”
Rivka Gottlieb, whose father, Michael, died two days after Aldrick, agreed that “disgusted” was the correct term. She said the continuing revelations about ministers’ lockdown-breaching parties made her feel like the “wounds have been reopened”.
She said: “It’s really devastating for families like ours – after what we went through at the time that these parties were taking place. My dad was dying … and we couldn’t be together to grieve afterwards. We couldn’t hug, we couldn’t comfort each other.”
She described her father as a “lovely, lovely person” who was generous, kind and loved to joke and chat.
News of the penalties, she said, “confirms what we were suspecting at the time – that the people in charge don’t care. They really didn’t care. That was the culture in Downing Street; partying and boozing and self-interest and not taking it seriously.”
Lobby Akinnola, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice , the campaign group to which both Adamson and Gottlieb belong, said: “After everything that’s happened, it’s still unbelievably painful to know that the prime minister was partying and breaking his own lockdown rules, while we were unable to be at our loved ones’ sides in their dying moments, or in miserable funerals with only a handful of people – because we were following the rules.
“The fact that the prime minister and his chancellor then lied about it and would have continued to do so if the police hadn’t intervened is truly shameless. They broke the law. But, even worse, they took us all for mugs.
“When we met the PM in the No 10 garden – the same one where they had these parties – he looked us in the eyes and said he had done everything he could to save our loved ones. We now know that that was a lie.
“There is simply no way either the prime minister or the chancellor can continue. Their dishonesty has caused untold hurt to the bereaved. Not only that, but they have lost all credibility with the wider public, which could cost lives if new variants mean restrictions are needed in the future. If they had any decency they would be gone by tonight.”
