Ministers and MPs are among those drinking too much due to work pressures, a Tory backbencher has said, rejecting an attempt at the Tory party conference to blame the Partygate scandal on a culture of drinking within the civil service.
Jeremy Wright, a member of a standards watchdog committee linked to the Cabinet Office, also told the event that “what went wrong” during Partygate was that the tone set by Johnson’s leadership meant a large number of civil servants and advisers believed they could hold parties despite being in breach of the law.
Wright, who was speaking at a fringe event about how trust in government could be rebuilt after the Johnson era, was responding to a question from the floor by a Tory member who claimed that the Conservative party had taken the blame during the Partygate scandal for a civil service drinking culture.
This was rejected by Wright, a member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, who said he didn’t come across a huge culture of drinking in the civil service when he was a minister, adding: “Every profession, every trade where you’re under pressure has some people who drink too much to cope with the pressure. Therefore, it’d be foolish to suggest that there aren’t some civil servants who drink too much. There are frankly, some politicians who drink too much as well, and that includes ministers who are making decisions, [though] not while they’re making decisions.”
The same event was told by the head of a union representing senior civil servants the first thing that the government should do to rebuild trust was to stop publicly denigrating civil servants.
The Johnson government had seen the entry into office of people who had been attacking the civil service over Brexit, said Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA Union.
“We’ve seen everything from the notes on desks, from Jacob Rees-Mogg, the hitlist that appeared on the front page of The Sunday Telegraph about permanent secretaries that are going to be sacked, and all of this was done in the knowledge that civil servants are unable to defend themselves, they’re constitutionally unable to defend themselves,” he added.
“I’ve known civil servants being attacked via special advisers and are having to go to those same advisers and try to get permission to defend themselves.”
Wright was also asked whether the Tory party as a whole needed to have a reckoning about the Johnson years given the extent of support among party members.
“Yes, that’s why he’s not prime minister any more and I suspect those who believe in political second acts have spent too long reading or perhaps even writing Churchill biographies because it hasn’t happened since him,” he said, to laughter.
“I’m not convinced it’s going to happen now, but who knows. But I think what you discover as a politician is that the waters close over your head faster than you ever thought or hoped and the world moves on without you.”
• This article was amended on 6 October 2022. A previous version incorrectly described Jeremy Wright as a member of parliament’s standards committee.
