Imagine, for a moment, being a cleaner at Number 10 Downing Street. Imagine coming into your work to clean up empty bottles from the tables and scrub red wine off the walls. And imagine being expected to do that the very same month the Prime Minister, whose staff were having multiple boozy shindigs, was telling you and everyone else in the country that they couldn’t be with their families that Christmas.
Imagine, on other days, being treated poorly by the very same people who were boozing, or singing karaoke, or fighting, or breaking garden furniture as the rest of the country stuck to the rules – and then being expected to clean up the vomit that had been left behind.
I have made no secret of the fact I’ve been pretty appalled at the very idea that those imposing the harshest and most restrictive laws ever imposed on our country in peacetime, didn’t abide by those same laws themselves. I have found it incomprehensible that a Prime Minister asking for so much sacrifice from so many, would not just preside over, but participate in, such flagrant and widespread rule breaking. For me, if you aren’t leading by example in a time of national crisis, then you aren’t leading at all.
I argued publicly that we didn’t – and shouldn’t – need the Metropolitan Police or Sue Gray to tell us the difference between right and wrong. That it was not acceptable for the Prime Minister to be a lawbreaker himself, to preside over a widespread culture of lawbreaking and to stand up in Parliament and lie about it.
So I thought there was nothing that yesterday’s report could say that would shock me. Nothing that could make an already shameful situation, worse. But I was wrong.
Seeing in black and white senior advisors and officials joke about having “got away with” boozy dos shows they knew what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway. To read Number 10’s ethics adviser decided the best way to get the party started was to bring along her own karaoke machine calls into question the ethical compass of the government as a whole. To see a top level advisor raise concerns about 200 people being invited to get drunk in the garden because it was a “comms risk” that might generate bad PR misses the point. It wasn’t a bad idea to encourage 200 people to grab a bottle and head for the lawn because the papers might not like it – it was a bad idea because it wasn’t allowed. It was a bad idea because people at home, outside this building, were being told they couldn’t meet a lonely parent, hold the hand of a sick patient or visit an isolated new mum.
To have the government – from the Prime Minister down – seek to explain away many of these events as ‘leaving dos’ that were simply an extension of the working day treats the country like fools. People at home know that ‘leaving dos’ weren’t allowed under the rules. They know that they, and ordinary people like them, across this country couldn’t even say goodbye to a dying relative, while those in power decided a press officer getting a new job was reason enough to party.
Sue Grey famously used to be a pub landlady in Northern Ireland. I can’t imagine how drunk some of these events had to become for her to describe “excessive alcohol consumption by some individuals.” Going on to describe how “one individual was sick. There was a minor altercation between two other individuals.”
But for me the grimmest passage in the whole report was when Ms Grey said she was “made aware of multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff. This was unacceptable.” The permanent staff at number 10 are exactly that. They were there years – and sometimes decades – before each new administration with all their hangers on, and they will watch them leave. The idea that those partying in the seat of power while the nation hunkered another lockdown were abusing and upbraiding the workers charged with keeping them safe and cleaning up their mess speaks to character. And it says something very rotten indeed.
The reason I have been so resolute and outspoken on this whole affair for months is because I believe in the institutions of our country. That old fashioned concepts like honesty, decency and transparency matter. That we should hold those granted huge powers over us to a higher standard, not a lower one. And that the great offices of state – like the office of Prime Minister – are more important than the individual holder of those offices at any given time. Especially if that person brings the office into disrepute.
The goings on in Downing street at a time of national crisis were unforgiveable. And I do not doubt that those who lost so many and sacrificed so much will not forgive. Why Conservative MPs are sitting on their hands, I do not know.
