The interim findings of a report by the civil servant Sue Gray are damning of the culture at the heart of Boris Johnson’s government. Ms Gray cited “failures of leadership and judgment”; “excessive” consumption of alcohol in the workplace; and officials cowed into silence about Covid rule-breaking in Downing Street. Ms Gray said she has been “extremely limited” by a police investigation and was unable to make firm conclusions about what she had discovered. However, Ms Gray’s report suggests that some of the events she examined didn’t comply with lockdown rules, saying that “a number of these gatherings should not have been allowed to take place or to develop in the way that they did”. Reading this, it’s hard to believe that the people who made the law had obeyed the law.
Mr Johnson’s argument to MPs had been that the Downing Street parties were not parties because lockdown guidance had been heeded. The Johnson logic was that since the rules said there could be no party, whatever happened wasn’t a party. The trouble with this reasoning is that Ms Gray has amassed enough evidence for the police to investigate a dozen potential criminal breaches of Covid rules in Mr Johnson’s home and office. The Met has 300 photographs and 500 pieces of paper from Ms Gray, which only raise the stakes for Tory MPs. This feels more like the vapour trail from a cruise missile than the wispy smoke coming off a warm gun.
To defend himself, the prime minister gave a perfunctory apology before playing the rousing orator. This performance ought to have fooled no one apart from loyalists who have been rehashing a repertoire of absurdities in Mr Johnson’s cause. The evidence points to the prime minister being at a party in his own garden when such gatherings were banned and when voters did not see their parents for months. One of Mr Johnson’s backbenchers asked him in parliament if he thought he was a “fool”.
The prime minister was reduced to shameful smears of Sir Keir Starmer, who had called for Mr Johnson to resign. The Labour leader gave perhaps his most effective Commons performance, with a speech laced with words that struck home because they were true. Mr Johnson, said Sir Keir, is a man without shame, whose response in a crisis is to blame everyone but himself.
What will happen to Mr Johnson will depend not on Ms Gray’s indictment, but on pure politics. The prime minister’s imperviousness to the opinions of others and to facts that didn’t suit him will have devastating consequences on trust in good government. Mr Johnson’s fate is in the hands of Tory MPs, which is presumably why he cancelled a call with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in favour of a meeting with his backbenchers. This scramble to keep his job also saw Mr Johnson take ownership of unpopular tax rises at the weekend, a price presumably extracted by his ambitious chancellor, Rishi Sunak.
Those who can bring Mr Johnson down in the Tory party are those who pulled him up into Downing Street – despite what that meant for the country. Mr Johnson no doubt hopes to play on Tory fears about the loss of power. His contention has long been that his political ascent proved that a lack of policy detail and probity are irrelevant compared with the electoral attraction of his showmanship. If Tory MPs choose to keep Mr Johnson after this debacle, then they will have shown to have had no regard for standards in public life or integrity in parliament. That would be bad for Britain, but would tell the country as much about the modern Conservative party as it says about the prime minister.
• This article was amended on 1 February 2022 to more accurately reflect the question to Johnson by one of his backbenchers – whether he considered him a “fool” rather than “took us all for fools”.
