Summary
Here’s a round-up of today’s politics news in the UK, the night before it is expected that civil servant Sue Gray will publish her report into lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street.
- A BBC Panorama documentary has heard that parties in Downing Street were so cramped that at one point, people were forced to sit on each others laps.
- Officials, given anonymity, said Boris Johnson would “throw his entire team under a bus” if it meant he would get past the Partygate scandal intact.
- They said that they felt Johnson had implicitly given them permission to hold events, because of his attendance. “He was grabbing a glass for himself,” one said.
- The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has asked the Metropolitan police why Johnson was not fined for attending Lee Cain’s leaving drinks on 13 November 2020, from which photographs have emerged. Others who attended were fined.
- One rebel Tory thinks the number of letters submitted to the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee demanding a vote of no confidence in Johnson is now in the high 40s, the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope reports. The threshold for a ballot to take place is 54.
And away from Partygate:
- Jonathan Brearley, the Ofgem chief executive, told MPs on the Commons business committee that he expects the energy price cap to rise to about £2,800 in October.
- The Resolution Foundation thinktank says raising the energy price cap to about £2,800, would almost double the number of families in fuel poverty.
- Former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick said he believed Rishi Sunak and the Treasury would come forward with another “significant” support package to help families through the cost of living crisis.
- Labour says it will vote against the Northern Ireland Troubles bill because it equated soldiers with terrorists.
- British officials did not require Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to sign a forced confession before her departure from Iran, but instead advised her that the Iranians would not allow her to leave unless she did so, the UK’s Middle East minister, Amanda Milling, told MPs.
That’s all for today, thank you for following.
Updated
Looking back, an official who worked in No 10 said: “I think for everybody it has been very distressing and shaming.
“The whole period was traumatic. It was very difficult to work on every single day. We were learning that people were dying in hospital beds and people were dying needlessly.
“We were worried about making mistakes and getting these big calls wrong and working through it.
“It was quite difficult to look back at that period now and thinking this is what will define it. Not the vaccine programmes, or food parcels for shielding people. It’ll be, what were you doing on 20 May in the garden?”
Afterwards, speaking to Kuenssberg, Iain Duncan Smith said Boris Johnson should survive the scandal because of the problems with the cost of living crisis and Ukraine and that there was a need for leadership.
And that’s it.
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