The knock on the door came just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Chloé Gardiner and her boyfriend were at home, but not alone. After a hard year, they had invited two friends over to see in 2021 with them, breaking strict rules in force in her area as the UK entered its second wave of the pandemic.
“There were three carloads of police in the end,” says Gardiner, a 23-year-old care assistant from the small town of Portstewart in Northern Ireland. “And there were only four of us.” It was hardly a wild party, she says – they were just hanging out, listening to music and posting the odd picture to social media – and she doesn’t know who reported them; they weren’t being loud, and they have no close neighbours. They were fined £200 each for breaching Covid regulations, deducted automatically in her case from her wages. Gardiner, who works two jobs, says money went from both pay packets, and she is still trying to recoup £100 she thinks was wrongly deducted in the confusion.
Working in care, Gardiner had seen the consequences of Covid-19. Why did she take the risk? “At the beginning I adhered to all the rules, but the more things went on – it’s bad for your mental health, it’s tough trying to stay away from people you see in your everyday life anyway. And for something as simple as a hug … it was just nice to have people over for New Year.”
Gardiner had never been in trouble with the police before, and initially felt bad about it. But when the health secretary, Matt Hancock, resigned the following summer after being caught kissing an aide, guilt turned to something more like indignation, followed by fury when stories of boozy lockdown parties in Downing Street began to surface. “It’s awful, what’s now coming out. It’s not just one or two. When their parties were going on, I was having to video-call families whose loved ones were on their deathbeds,” she says. “How can we live by the government’s rules if they can’t live with them themselves?”
That question has reverberated through Westminster in recent weeks, as tales of a “bring-your-own-booze” party in the Downing Street garden and Friday night “wine-time” sessions dripped out. Individual liberties have been curtailed to a previously unimaginable degree during the pandemic – and sometimes huge sacrifices have been made. Mourners avoided hugging each other at funerals; mothers gave birth alone; and for months on end millions of Britons left their homes only for essential errands such as exercising and buying food. Most complied, with a YouGov poll in 2020 finding 68% of Britons claimed to have done everything asked of them. But one in four didn’t – numbers likely to have risen as the pandemic wore on. Now the realisation that those who set the rules may have repeatedly broken them is casting the last two years in a different light, prompting difficult questions about freedom, trust in government, and the power of the state.
By last December, police in England and Wales had issued 118,963 fines for breaking Covid regulations – anything from meeting one friend when socialising was banned, through to staging illegal raves, with fines ranging from £100 for minor infractions to £10,000 for the most egregious, and sometimes more in cases of late payment. In Northern Ireland, police issued more than 8,000 fines over the year to March 2021, and Scottish police handed out more than 12,843 in the year to August 2021. Over half of all Covid fines were issued during the lockdown between January and March 2021, when schools, pubs, offices and restaurants shut once again, and the initial novelty of clapping for the NHS gave way for some to frustration, deepening financial hardship and plummeting mental health.
As so few cases reached trial, it’s not always clear what drove the rule-breakers (fixed penalty notices, or FPNs, are processed like speeding fines, usually without a defendant going to court). A handful of sad cases have made headlines, from the Somerset care worker fined for eating a sandwich in her car, post-shift, at a beauty spot (deemed a non-essential journey) to a lonely 66-year-old pensioner from London who met friends at his allotment as he picked greens for supper.
Not every case, however, elicits such sympathy. In London, 31 police officers responsible for enforcing Covid laws were fined for breaking them to get haircuts. Three students in Norwich were each fined £10,000 for throwing a house party for 100 people. And on the day the Queen buried her husband of 70 years, sitting alone in her funeral pew, a 27-year-old Londoner named Vianna McKenzie-Bramble marked her birthday with a marquee, a bouncy castle and around 60 guests gathering outside her flat. What she couldn’t have known was that hours earlier Downing Street staff had also hosted two illicit leaving bashes, reportedly merging into one drunken gathering. Although Boris Johnson wasn’t present, No 10 would later apologise to the Queen.
Police called out to break up McKenzie-Bramble’s party in Victoria Park, London, found the grass littered with empty bottles and nitrous oxide canisters. Over at Downing Street, there was reportedly dancing in the basement and someone broke a swing used by Johnson’s toddler son. While she was fined £12,000, the Downing Street party remained a secret for eight months, despite the presence of a 24-hour police guard outside No 10.
For many who suffered traumatic lockdowns and stuck to the rules, the thought of Downing Street aides swigging gin in the garden may be enraging. Yet some Britons caught partying during lockdown seem almost as infuriated by the idea of those in power getting away with what they were punished for doing. If the pandemic once divided Britons into rule-takers and rule-breakers, the partygate scandal may have briefly reunited them in anger.
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There is a stretch of boggy marshland, on the fringes of the London suburb of Edmonton, that could have been made for illegal parties. Bordering an area where fly-tippers dump old sofas, it’s close enough to a busy road to mask the sound from the DJ decks, but over three miles from nearby houses. When police were called to this wasteland on 30 May last year, they found around 500 people who had been raving all night and into the morning, in defiance of Covid rules limiting outdoor gatherings to 30 people.
Party organiser Jayden Elworthy, a DJ, actor and aspiring model from London, claimed to be “saving lives on the dancefloor” and said of Covid that “we are past that now”, according to the officers’ testimony to court. In his absence, Westminster magistrates fined him the maximum allowable under coronavirus law – £10,000, rising to £12,000 for failing to pay a fixed penalty notice promptly.
Over the phone from Barcelona, where he is currently working, Elworthy is initially defiant. When he organised the rave, he says, Ascot racecourse was preparing to welcome thousands of racegoers, and football crowds would soon be gathering to watch the Euros. “No one cared. Everyone was mixing,” he says. “I’m not going to have people govern me when firstly they don’t even abide by their own governance, and secondly that governance is flawed.” Elworthy, who has had Covid twice, agrees there was a “limited necessity” for restrictions to stop it spreading, but is suspicious of the science. He spends some time expounding on a complex conspiracy theory popular online, involving US public health officials supposedly paying a Chinese lab to make the virus, alongside various plots he believes were covered up by the mainstream media. His private rule of thumb, he says, was that partying was acceptable if the R rate of the virus was under one. But the bravado crumbles when it comes to the fine. He can’t pay, he says, and seems paralysed thinking about it. “I don’t know what to do. I haven’t even appealed it. I just prioritise everything else in my life instead.”
The clubbing and events sector in which Elworthy earns a living was the first to be shut down and the last to be reopened in successive lockdowns. He runs a tech company on the side, but still had to claim universal credit at times, and has friends who lost everything; others, he says, were key workers risking infection every time they went to work, who felt they had little left to lose by mingling socially, too. “For some it was easy – you could stay at home and avoid it. But some were forced out into the wilderness of Covid, so then what’s the point of staying in when your mental health is at risk? There were a couple of DJs who killed themselves because overnight they had nothing – no career, no life.”
The parties, he insists, were about “saving people from loneliness, depression, drug abuse. I had friends calling me, crying, saying, ‘I don’t know what to do, I feel like a fish in a fishbowl; I go to work, I come back, I’ve already had Covid and I’m sat in my room going crazy.’ It’s breaking the law to even say, ‘Come over.’”
After his court case was reported in the press, Elworthy got some abuse online. But he thinks the mood changed when the tales from No 10 tumbled out. “No one blames me now,” he says. “Everyone’s like, ‘So why were we staying at home, then?’”
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Jack started his biology degree in autumn 2020, just as the second Covid wave was gathering force. He had no face-to-face teaching for his first year at University College London and was largely confined to halls, sharing a flat with five strangers he didn’t get on with. After the country locked down again on 5 January 2021, he says, police patrolled the halls alongside university guards, making students stick to their rooms.
At 19, Jack wasn’t afraid of catching the virus, but he did fear the financial consequences of breaking lockdown. “A friend had a party and he got fined £1,800; his mum ended up taking a loan out to pay for it. It doesn’t seem right, the pressure that was put on us – sit in your room and be really depressed, or leave the room and financially cripple yourself. You don’t want to harm anyone by giving them Covid, but you don’t want to end up wasting your life away in a room, either.” So one February night, Jack sneaked upstairs to see friends.
There were seven of them in a room, he says, keeping quiet so as not to attract attention. But they were caught by security guards and each fined £100. “What we were doing was obviously wrong, but I could justify it to myself in the sense that we weren’t seeing anyone who was vulnerable – it was all in the same building, and I was with people I’d been seeing every day just before lockdown,” he says. “Even though breaking the rules is obviously not a good thing, it’s interesting that the students who didn’t break the rules noticeably struggled to fit in. A lot of them are currently living alone or have mental health issues.”
Will, now in his second year at university in Cardiff, also succumbed to temptation after a frustrating year of cancelled A-levels and staying in. “I had spent my whole life at school and then three months before my final exams it was like, ‘Nope, see you later.’ We never had a prom or a leavers’ ball. Then we got here and it was: ‘Stay put, don’t go to lectures,’” he recalls. Learning moved online, and all five of his student housemates dropped out of university; rattling round the house on his own, he threw one illicit lockdown party without getting caught, emboldening him to try again last March. This time, with around 100 guests and music blaring out, the party was broken up by campus security. His friends vanished quickly, leaving, as Will puts it, “just me, in my now really dirty house”. Given the size of the party and the fact that it was his house, Will was warned he could be fined up to £6,000.
What possessed him? “Being students, you feel a little bit – not invulnerable, but we were surrounded by each other. We weren’t going into lectures, we weren’t going to give it to our elderly professors,” he says. After a meeting convened between police and his university to settle several outstanding student cases, Will escaped with a £30 fine and a warning. He says of the Downing Street party allegations: “It’s so bizarre, I don’t even really know how to process it. I only got fined £30, and my mum was nice enough to pay it, but there will have been people who got a £6,000 fine who are students, who are in debt, yet the people at the top of the country are doing this.”
Harry, a 22-year-old final-year student in Newcastle who was also fined after being caught socialising at another student house, feels differently. Some of his friends racked up fines of up to £800, yet they felt it was worth the risk when nightclubs were closed: “The first time you got caught it was £100, and we were probably saving that on entrance fees and drinks.” Harry voted Conservative at the last election, and takes an equally relaxed view of Johnson’s conduct. “You’ve got a few young spads and it’s their social life – I kind of think of these people as the weird kids at school [about whom] you thought, ‘I hope they never go into politics’ and they probably don’t have much of a life outside work. Boris Johnson wasn’t elected to be a cookie-cutter Hugh Grant-type prime minister, was he?”
Larissa Kennedy, president of the National Union of Students, argues that only a “very small minority” of students broke the rules, and often only because they were struggling emotionally. “I’ve spoken to people who had months of not seeing anyone, who were only going out once a day for their exercise and not talking to a living soul. Some of them had moved countries to come to the UK and study, only to be locked into a room.”
But Jack, Will and Harry are typical lockdown-breakers in one sense, which is that they’re all young men. A study led by researchers at the University of Sheffield, part of a larger exercise examining everything from young people’s compliance with advice to wash their hands to their mental health during the pandemic, found that over half of men aged 19 to 24 admitted breaking Covid guidelines during the first lockdown in spring 2020. One in five men aged 19 to 21 reported being arrested, fined, warned or escorted home by police, compared with only one in 10 women that age.
One explanation is that men were more likely to guess that their own friends wouldn’t comply with lockdown, encouraging them to rebel without fear of being judged for it. Dr Jilly Gibson-Miller, lecturer in psychology at Sheffield, explains over Zoom that young people’s willingness to take risks depends on how they perceive others who do it. “If they identify with that person, they’re more willing to take that risk. It boils down to social comparison,” she says. “They might see a person who followed the rules as more sensible or more grown up, but that’s not necessarily a cool thing.” Where older age groups saw rule-breakers as selfish or immature, the study found young men tended to see them as “cool” or “independent”. They also tended to underplay the dangers of Covid, says the study’s co-author, Dr Liat Levita. “I think they didn’t see the point of complying. When we asked questions such as, ‘How much risk are you to others?’, the males tended to underestimate it.”
The study did, however, find links between compliance and mental health, with those feeling anxious more likely to obey the rules and those feeling depressed more likely to break them and seek out company. “Anxiety has a survival value,” says Levita, who argues that while many young people described feeling anxious during the pandemic, that may have been a healthy reaction, so long as that anxiety was not crippling. “But depression is interesting, in terms of how low mood affects your behaviour. You’re less likely to engage with anything, you have very low motivations – with that kind of diagnosis, we did find people struggled more in adhering to the guidelines.”
Nonetheless, Levita and Gibson-Miller argue that young people shouldn’t be seen as having behaved recklessly and that, if anything, it’s surprising so many complied with unprecedented curbs on their freedom. “They didn’t wash their hands so well. Sometimes, they broke the rules. But they did almost everything we asked of them, without going out into the streets and creating anarchy and throwing bottles around and rioting,” Levita says. And while those aged between 18 and 29 received over half of fines issued up to March 2021, plenty of other recipients were arguably old enough to know better.
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Harriet is a 54-year-old teacher from Hampshire, who followed the rules religiously through the first lockdown. But by December 2020, she was growing restless. A keen wild swimmer, she drove to the shingle beach at Hill Head near Portsmouth with two female friends for a bracing dip between Christmas and New Year, even though the restrictions in force allowed for meeting only one person outside her household to exercise. Heading into the chilly water, they bumped into two more swimmers they knew. The women were towelling off afterwards when a policeman, who she suspects was tipped off by another beachgoer, approached. “I was so embarrassed I just pulled my towel over my head,” she admits. “He said, ‘Are you part of the same household?’ and there was this silence that lasted a bit too long – do you tell the truth or lie? But being the good citizens we are, we told the truth.” The women apologised profusely and were relieved when, instead of fining them, the officer merely warned them not to do it again.
As a teacher, Harriet arguably risked jeopardising her professional reputation by breaking the law. What possessed her? “We were doing something that, in our view, we had risk-assessed, that was in a bit of a grey area – you were allowed to meet one other person outside; we were just a bit on the edge of that,” she says. “We had the windows open and we were fully masked in the car.” It felt odd, she adds, that she was allowed to work all day with hundreds of potentially infectious children, yet she was barred from meeting friends.
The rollout of the longed-for Covid vaccine that winter may have encouraged a surprising number of older Britons to drop their guard. The Office for National Statistics found that almost half of over-80s met someone from outside their household or bubble indoors after their first jab, and given the timing of vaccinations, many must have breached the January to March lockdown to do so. After months in hiding, seeing their grandchildren only over FaceTime, perhaps loneliness got the better of some.
From the beginning, police have had some discretion to exercise compassion in such circumstances, via a strategy allowing them to explain and warn lockdown-breakers rather than leap to penalty notices. But even compassion can have its downsides, if exercised disproportionately in favour of some groups over others. Research published last year by the human rights pressure group Liberty found people of colour were 54% more likely to be fined for breaching Covid laws than white people, reflecting concerns that “existing patterns about the policing of certain communities would be replicated and exacerbated” by an enforcement-led approach to lockdown, as its policy and campaigns officer Jun Pang puts it. Alternative measures such as improving sick pay and halting evictions could, she argues, have been used to help low earners comply.
Whether or not they were more likely to break the rules, the poor were arguably disproportionately likely to get caught. Hiding a party is easier in a remote country house – or a bomb-proofed building sealed off from the public road, like No 10 – than an inner-city flat with paper-thin walls. Flat-dwellers with no outside space, meeting in parks for illicit beers, were more visible to police patrols than homeowners smuggling guests into suburban gardens. Alba Kapoor, senior policy officer at the Runnymede Trust, meanwhile points out that ethnic minority Britons were disproportionately more likely to be living in overcrowded and pressured conditions when lockdown hit. “For us, the key takeaway is that the extension of police powers in this way will always have a disproportionate impact on BAME groups and on black men in particular,” she says. And, she points out, all this unfolded just as an emerging Black Lives Matter movement was providing a new focus for old frustrations with the criminal justice system.
In January 2021, Bianca Ali was getting ready for a protest marking the death in police custody of a black man, Mohamud Hassan, when two police vans pulled up outside her Cardiff flat. “I live alone and I’m 5ft 2in – I’m not a threat,” says Ali, 30, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Cardiff Community. “They were banging on my front door saying that they knew I was in there – I didn’t open the door, I didn’t know what could happen to me. It was a really intimidating situation.” Ali was warned to expect a fine for organising a protest gathering in lockdown, although she insists she wasn’t the organiser.
It didn’t stop her joining the socially distanced protest outside Cardiff Bay police station, which lasted four days. “I was there for something bigger than me. If they want to give me a fine, it’s not going to stop me protesting about the death of a black person,” she says now. Ali was handed a £500 fine, but refused to pay, triggering a stressful eight-month legal battle that ended last autumn with police dropping the prosecution. Nonetheless, she was shaken by the process. “I suffer from anxiety, and my anxiety went through the roof,” she says. “Even now, if I walk from my house to my mum’s house, I have to pass the police station, and my stomach turns over. It’s a horrible feeling, especially on evenings like this when it’s dark. Who’s going to believe me, a young black woman from a rough area of Cardiff, against the police?”
Ali was represented by Patrick Ormerod, a solicitor with the London firm Bindmans, who argued that she was exercising her human rights in protesting, and thus had a reasonable excuse for breaching lockdown. Having also handled cases of students threatened with £10,000 fines for throwing parties in which the legislation turned out to have been misapplied, Ormerod argues a straightforward mechanism for appealing Covid fines is urgently needed. “I hope the Covid public inquiry will look at what could have been done differently with the criminal justice response to the pandemic. Jacob Rees-Mogg [the leader of the Commons] has suggested we should look at whether the restrictions were proportionate, but I think the inquiry should also look at how so many people were criminalised when they probably weren’t guilty of the offences,” he says, pointing out that for those who can’t afford lawyers, the prospect of challenging fines in court is daunting.
That was true for Ali Lawrence, a musician and music teacher from York who for decades has supplemented his living by busking. During the first summer of the pandemic, when the rules relaxed and restaurants were buzzing with “eat out to help out”, he managed to get out and play. But by March 2021, having earned almost nothing in three months and exhausted a government support grant, he was poring over the regulations trying to establish whether busking was allowed.
“During the 18 months of restrictions, nearly every musician was out of work. It was a tough time,” he says. “There wasn’t really any clear explanation in the rules – the only thing it said was that if you couldn’t work from home, you could travel to your place of work. And cases like mine are a business.” When he settled down at his piano in a busy York square, he took a copy of the regulations and a photocopy of his tax return to show music was his job, but was nonetheless told to stop by a police officer because he was “drawing an audience”. (He admits it may not have helped that when the officers approached his busking partner, Karl Mullen, the latter started playing the Laurel and Hardy theme tune on the piano.) Footage uploaded to YouTube from a bystander’s mobile phone shows a masked Lawrence at his piano and curious shoppers skirting round him, while a passerby observes that “there’s more people in Morrisons than there are here”. North Yorkshire police handed him a £200 fine.
Lawrence didn’t want to pay up for what he thought didn’t constitute an illegal gathering, but feared getting a criminal record if he went to court and lost. “So I caved in. But I felt awful, because I thought, ‘Well, I haven’t done anything wrong – I’m just trying to work.’” (North Yorkshire police subsequently said in a statement that his fine was for “contravening an officer’s instructions” to stop.)
While Lawrence views Johnson’s so-called “work events” in Downing Street as “just what you expect” of politicians, his experiences have changed the way he feels about the police. He remains anxious about getting into trouble, and recently when he was asked to move on while busking in a nearby market town, he gave in for fear of another fine. He is closely following the progress through parliament of the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, which contains controversial new restrictions on protest. “I’m worried that we’re losing all our freedoms. It’s in the back of my mind that we had almost a bit of a police state last year.”
Over the last two years the police have been visible in everyday lives as never before: patrolling parks, interrogating dog walkers at beauty spots, breaking up backyard barbecues. And for some who haven’t previously experienced the sharp end of the law, that may have been a wakeup call. The NUS’s Larissa Kennedy thinks the pandemic may have shaped young people’s feelings about the police, citing a resurgence of “cops off campus” campaigns fuelled by resentment at the heavy security presence during lockdown – including instances of black students being stopped and challenged when trying to get into their own halls. Liberty’s Jun Pang, meanwhile, wonders whether living under this level of surveillance may prompt some Britons who hadn’t previously been in trouble with the police to empathise more with minority communities. “It’s really interesting, hearing people talk about their first interactions with the police. People might describe it as quite arbitrary or say they don’t understand what’s going on. Well, something we have been trying to say from the beginning is that lots of communities experience arbitrary policing because of things like racism and discrimination; lots of people have interactions with the police that don’t seem to make any sense. I think this is a really interesting moment.”
If all goes to plan, and the government lifts all pandemic restrictions in March, the era of Covid fines will be over. But long after memories of being banned from sitting on a park bench have faded, some will still be quietly paying off those fines. And for those like Jack, who broke the law when they were young and lonely, the corrosive feeling that it’s one rule for the governed and another for the government lingers. “They were doing it because they think they’re above the law, and they are above the law, really,” he says of parties at No 10. “The police weren’t patrolling Downing Street, they weren’t checking if those people were in groups of six. They didn’t do that for the MPs – they did it for students. But if anything, maybe it should have been the other way round.”
