19th May 2022
Partygate, again.
Today the Metropolitan Police announced the end of their investigation.
This means that, in small part, the Partygate issue comes to an end.
But there are at least four things which may now flow from the circumstances of the unlawful gatherings at Number 10 during the pandemic.
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The first, of course, is publication of the Sue Gray report.
This unseen report now has many expectations loaded onto it.
It is useful to remind yourself of her terms of reference.
Whatever is – and is not – in her published report, it is more likely than not to be in accordance with these terms of reference.
It is also useful to remind yourself of her truncated interim ‘update’.
That update indicated – though not in any definite way – where there may be problems for Downing Street when the final report is published (see this blog’s previous post here).
Two paragraphs of the update, in particular, are worth reminding yourself of:
“ii. At least some of the gatherings in question represent a serious failure to observe not just the high standards expected of those working at the heart of Government but also of the standards expected of the entire British population at the time.
“iii. At times it seems there was too little thought given to what was happening across the country in considering the appropriateness of some of these gatherings, the risks they presented to public health and how they might appear to the public. There were failures of leadership and judgment by different parts of No 10 and the Cabinet Office at different times. Some of the events should not have been allowed to take place. Other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did.”
Whether the report leads to any political change – and whether it is, in fact, the timebomb suggested by the earlier post – is, of course, determined by politics and the remarkable capacity of the current Prime Minister to evade accountability.
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The second consequence of Partygate is – on the face of it – potentially more significant constitutionally.
This is the House of Commons committee’s investigation into whether the Prime Minister misled parliament.
Here a difficulty for the Prime Minister is not so much whether he realised the parties he attended were unlawful gatherings, but when he knew.
This is important because, as this blog has previously set out, it appears that the Prime Minister is not only under an obligation to put the record straight, but also to do so at the earliest opportunity.
This point was well explained by Alexander Horne in this thread:
However, the rule also has a second limb – which to my mind is equally important. Ministers are expected to correct “any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.” Thus, it is not sufficient for the PM to say that he did not “knowingly” mislead Parliament. /4
— Alexander Horne (@AlexanderHorne1) April 22, 2022
Even if the Prime Minister did not realise at the time the gatherings were unlawful, he no doubt knew once he saw the Sue Gray report and/or was advised in response to the Metropolitan Police investigation.
The committee may perhaps find that Boris Johnson did tell parliament at the first available opportunity, or it may hold the rule somehow does not apply, or it may censure him.
Again, the political consequences of any censure – or sanction – are not predictable with the current Prime Minister.
But misleading the House of Commons and not correcting the record as soon as one can are still serious matters, even in this age of Johnson, Brexit and 2022.
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A third possible consequence of Partygate is the worrying normalisation of politically motivated reporting of opponents to the police.
This blog recently set out this concern – and the concern has also been articulated by newspaper columnists:
This is a really good article by @Dannythefink on how dangerous it is for the police to be driven into investigating covid breaches by politicians. https://t.co/utaEky2Nff pic.twitter.com/oRvJ7yQiwi
— Matthew Scott (@Barristerblog) May 18, 2022
This is an issue distinct from the obvious truth that politicians should not be above the law.
This issue is about when there is political pressure for there to be police intervention in respect of opponents, where such pressure would not be applied in respect of one’s own ‘side’.
Unless a report would be made to the police in the same circumstances when it was a political ally rather than an opponent, the report is being made on a partisan basis.
And routine goading of police involvement – and their coercive powers – on a partisan basis is not a good sign in any political system.
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The fourth possible consequence is more optimistic.
The covid regulations were an exercise in bad and rushed legislation, where – even accounting for it being a pandemic – insufficient care was given to the rules imposed and to how they were enforced.
This was pointed out at the time – by this blog and many other legal commentators.
The fact there was a pandemic was used as an excuse for shoddy drafting rather than it being the reason.
And part of the shoddiness was, no doubt, because these were seen by those in the executive as being rules for other people – that is, for the rest of us.
One perhaps positive thing about Partygate is that senior officials, politicians and advisers in the government now are aware that such rules can apply to them.
This may mean that in the event of another pandemic requiring similar rules, the provisions will have more anxious scrutiny before being put in palce and enforced.
That said, of course, it is perhaps also possible that the government will just make sure that future rules expressly do not apply to Whitehall.
But we have to take what possible positives that we can from this gods-awful governmentally-self-inflicted political, legal and constitutional mess, known as Partygate.
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5th consequence. In the event of a further, serious Covid variant & the necessity for ANY restrictions, nobody is going to follow them & the police will have no authority to enforce them. And more people will die as a direct result of the PM’s overriding desire to remain in post.
Yes. Just as people — probably thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands — have died as a direct of Cummings’ jaunt to Barnard Castle and complete lack of consequences to him.
I am strangely drawn to the 4th consequence, of ‘rushed legislation’ and implementation. The whole panic on PPE & test/trace £37bn signals a govt in hysteria but where no responsibility was shown. Imagine if we were at war instead of Johnson just pretending he is a war leader?
There are some interesting elements to the points you raise.
For example, of the £37 billion spent, how much went out to tender? How much went to existing contractors and suppliers where we had already conducted some form of tendering/due diligence process? (And by inference, how much was spent with relatively unknown third parties?)
I haven’t explicitly looked, so I’m not aware if there has been any for of GAO examination of spending practices, but it would be helpful if we had one and for the findings to be published.
Moving on, with regards to the test-and-trace question, how did this turn in to such a complete debacle? We had Apple and Google offering test-and-trace solutions that guaranteed the privacy of handset owners and who had working, ready-to-go solutions. So why did the government instead invest millions in a solution that didn’t work and which was proposed by Palantir technologies, owned by Peter Thiel and one of the creepiest of creepy surveillance companies? And back to the obvious questions: What was spent? Who were the recipients? What did the nation get for the money? How is that investment going to be preserved for future use, i.e. for the next pandemic? (As opposed, for example, to being told that we’ll have to fund the same thing all over again…)
“The covid regulations were an exercise in bad and rushed legislation, where – even accounting for it being a pandemic – insufficient care was given to the rules imposed and to how they were enforced.”
Also, it’s very disappointing that there weren’t better thought-out sets of draft legislation already available as contingency plans. We’ve had sufficient recent warnings (SARS, Ebola) that it’d be reasonable for the public to expect they’d have something on hand for various combinations of transmissible and/or dangerous diseases getting loose.
Apologies that this may stray a little too far off the topic of the article, but I want to highlight what you’ve said her and the importance it carries for the nation.
You note that, “it’s very disappointing that there weren’t better thought-out sets of draft legislation already available as continugency plans” and go on to note that plethora of warnings we’ve had from other widespread, virulent and harmful infections.
Let’s for a moment be generous to this administration and agree to excuse them for not having comprehensive response plans in place and in so doing “cut them some slack”and attribute that failing to predecessor administrations.
As I write this we’re approaching the closing days of May, 2022. It was March 23rd, 2020, when the Prime Minister announced the first UK lockdown and ordered everyone to stay at home. It was March 25th when the Coronavirus Act 2020 received Royal Assent and it was March 26th, 2020, when the Act came in to full effect.
That’s almost 26 months ago.
What, exactly, has the government done to revisit our national pandemic preparedness? What parliamentary committees or inquiries have been set up to examine the nation’s response capability? What undertakings has the government had with big business in respect of the supply chain issues that we saw? What guidance has been issued to UK and international carries who operate in the UK with respect to curtailing flights from potential infection hot-spots? What future plans do we have in place for handling the quarantine of passengers as they land?
I have seen copies of leaflets that the UK government issued in response to the threat of nuclear war, from the darkest days of the cold war. I remember seeing archives of the “Protect and Survive” videos and “commercials” that ran on TV – some readers might remember the ones where homeowners were told to take interior doors off their hinges to make an indoor shelter, to bottle up water and store food.
The simple fact is that the world has already lost far, far more lives to Covid19 and its derivatives than to nuclear war, yet our response as a nation and a planet seems bordering on the apathetic.
One of the questions we should be asking our elected representatives is: “What are you doing to learn from the mistakes made during the Covid Pandemic, to ensure that we won’t experience the same issue in future?
It’s a variation on the old maxim, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me…” If I already know you’ve been incompetent once and I allow you to be incompetent a second time, the issue isn’t you, it’s me. We don’t have to wait for a general election to hold representatives to account.
It terrifies me that Westminster in general, this administration as an alleged example of a functioning government (I await evidence of that, just not with baited breath) the collective cabinet and their (please don’t laugh) responsibility, or the Prime Minister and his (OK, you can laugh for this one) accountability, seem to be operating on the idea that we’ll all forget that things were bad and that they can “get away” with doing nothing.
Why is it important to “get away” with that? Because the changes and safeguards we would need to put in place would dent the profits of large corporations and party donors.
And that’s what worries me.
I know it’s hopelessly naive but wouldn’t it be nice if the fallout from partygate was the realisation and subsequent acceptance by the entire Tory party that collectively they’ve made a bit of a hash if it, and a determination to try to do better?
What worries me is a government apparently devoid of any shred of intelligence or integrity, with a motivation that seems to consist solely in self interest, and who are prepared to break or attempt to rewrite any law or rule they feel they can’t just ignore.
If Tory MPs persist in behaving like sheep the consequence of partygate will be an emboldened PM even more convinced of his own infallibility.
Brace, brace …
“What are you doing to learn from the mistakes … to ensure that we won’t experience the same issue in future?”
As the saying goes, history rarely repeats, but it often rhymes. So – monkeypox?
The other consequence is perhaps an extension of the existing habit of government to, dexterously to shape legislation so that it can avoid being caught by it or to allow vague ‘national security’ or ‘commercially confidential’ labels on information and evidence to hobble attempts to bring them to account. The whole system of funding of political parties, containing many things that would otherwise run foul of the Bribery Act, comes to mind.
The situation at present, where the PM has thus far evaded proper scrutiny both on management of the Pandemic and on behaviour during it, illustrate also how this will continue to go. Unjustly.
Another consequence… Faith in the Met police sinks ever lower.
I fear that the 4th point (“…such rules can apply to them.”) will be learnt all too well and future legislation or Statutory Instruments will have clauses excluding Government officials from the rules.
I’ll probably get the specifics wrong… but isn’t it already the case that an elected MP can make a statement on the floor of the House of Commons, with impunity, even if that statement would meet the legal definition of slander if said anywhere else?
In other words, aren’t they doing this already?
I know this is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, but in my limited life-experience, the more power granted an individual, or collective body, or institution, the more controls and safeguards should be placed around it, to limit how that power can be used or misused.
We seem perpetually unable or unwilling to learn this lesson.
I’m pretty sure these don’t qualify as consequences of this investigation – apologies for that – but I have a few follow-on questions.
The first one is: even though the details relating to the fines are not being made public at this time, is it possible that someone may be able to request them under the Freedom Of Information Act? It seems at least plausible that a public interest argument could be made in favour of a release.
The second question is: do we have an expectation, and would there be any way to confirm or disprove, that the Metropolitan Police acted with scrupulous, objective consistency with all the evidence they were able to verify? For example, suppose the Met had found that the Prime Minister had attended three events where they had elected to fine other participants, but the Met then went on to conclude that the Prime Minister only needed to receive a fine for the first of these, on the grounds that he had already been publicly sanctioned for hist judgements and/or that because the multiple offences all existed in the past, he would not have an opportunity to correct his conduct after the first fine?
Third question is… that it has been reported in the last day or so that the Prime Minister “is not going to receive any more fines”. OK. But that could also mean that – and I appreciate I am stretching the fabric of credulity here – the Met could have publicly charged the Prime Minister with a first fine, privately charged him with one or more additional fines… and then come out and said that the Prime Minister would not receive any *more* fines. Any more after which one? Does the Met statement explicitly and categorically follow on from an established fact base that the PM has in fact only received one fine?
Bonus (aka slightly more off-topic) question… I hope it would not be too offensive to say that the conduct of the Metropolitan Police in this matter has not been quite as exemplary as perhaps we’d like. Events also highlight the difficult (near impossible) tightrope that the Met as an agency and the Met Commissioner as an individual have to walk just in order to do their job. It seems as though this stems in large part from the fact that the role of Met Commissioner is perhaps more political than any other Chief Constable role anywhere in the country. Would it then be fair to say that this suggests a case should be made for establishing the same sort of oversight for the Metropolitan Police as exists for the County forces all around the country? I ask this not to be critical of the existing system, but to observe that this experience highlights that the political appointment of a Met Chief is, well, knowingly unwise.
Is there a workable alternative?