Sometimes things that are self-evident still need to be pointed out. So it is with one aspect of the crisis we now know as “partygate”, and an element of the story that both observers and participants have seemed to take for granted: the fact that all the disgrace and deceit revealed since December took place amid a level of plenty that millions of people will surely consider almost surreal.
This is not just a matter of a suitcase full of booze, generous helpings of M&S “picnic food” and the infamous fridge that held 34 bottles of wine. Consider the bit-part players: an interior designer whose wallpaper of choice costs £840 a roll, a London property developer (and Tory donor) famed for taking out an £80m mortgage, and a chancellor whose family is reckoned to be worth more than the Queen. Note also the centrality to the Boris Johnson soap opera of cake, from the kind he says he can have while eating it, to the confection he was “ambushed” with in the cabinet room. In this world, any privations demanded by lockdown were more than balanced out by the comforts of eating, drinking and ostentatiously spending, not least on what Johnson apparently terms “letting off steam”.
