Lost In the Gray Zone
Why Partygate is Not Just Good Clean Lawless Fun
When historians attempt to understand the UK’s ongoing moral collapse, they may well encounter the ‘Findings of Second Permanent Secretary’s Investigation Into Alleged Gatherings on Government Premises During Covid Restrictions’, otherwise known as the Sue Gray report, which was finally published yesterday.
How, they might ask, was the highest office in the land turned into a Poundland Sodom and Gomorrah, in the middle of a collective national trauma involving the deaths of tens of thousands? Had the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom really allowed this to happen? Why was he still in office?
By the time these questions are asked, Johnson will be long gone, though the bar that he has now lowered makes it more than likely that even worse may follow. But for those of us who have to live through this sordid era and would like to believe that this country could be better than it is, May 25, 2022 was yet another dismal day in the long nightmare that we can’t wake up from.
It wasn’t just the report itself. Much of it makes tedious reading and confirms what we already knew; that Johnson and his staff had engaged in systematic lawless partying in the midst of a pandemic in which millions had observed the rules that Johnson himself had introduced, often with painful consequences for themselves and for their families.
It’s true that the report supplied some new details. We didn’t know the extent to which Downing Street had been into 10 Bullingdon Street, where rightwing jeunesse doree vomited, fought each other, broke furniture, spaffed wine against the hallowed walls, sang karaoke, and treated cleaners and security guards with contempt. All this knowing that the rest of us were still battening down the hatches, still unable to visit dying relatives still forbidden to participate in any public gatherings that were not strictly work-related.
It’s an understatement to call this unedifying, and there was a time when such revelations would been unimaginable, and would certainly have had dire political consequences for everyone concerned, but these are not normal times, and definitely not good times.
Sue Gray may well point out that ‘The public have a right to expect the very highest standards of behaviour in such places and clearly what happened fell well short of this’, but the truth is that the public lost that right when it elected Johnson to power, and now the mother of parliaments has lost the right - or at least the ability - to hold the government to account even as the government debases everything it touches.
According to Gray, ‘The senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture.’ But what happens if that government is led by a man who has never taken responsibility for anything, never shown any empathy to anyone, and never encountered any rule that his inflated sense of his own self-worth didn’t entitle him to break?
Once upon a time a prime minister would have had to resign even for allowing the Downing Street debauches to take place, let alone actually participating in them himself and lying afterwards about such participation to both the public and parliament.
But Posh Trump isn’t that kind of leader, and his party members and his MPs have long since abandoned the moral compass and the backbone that might have made him any better than he is.
And that is why yesterday was so demoralising and dispiriting. It wasn’t just because Johnson pretended to take ‘full responsibility’ for partygate while refusing to resign. It wasn’t just the fake-humility followed by the usual Buller Buller Buller arrogance, the ‘Vladimir Corbyn’ and ‘Sir Beer Korma’ taunts that he and his ghoulish colleagues find so endlessly amusing.
All that is par for the course, however repellent.
But was really sickening was the seemingly endless hallelujah chorus of Tory Ministers and MPs who took to the airwaves and Twitter to disseminate orchestrated comms messages to the effect that partygate was over, that the PM had apologised, and that it was time to move on and deal with Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis and the other challenges.
One minute they would pop up to argue that Johnson could be be responsible for what happened at Downing Street, because Downing Street was not a terraced house, but a big house with lots of people in it. The next you could find one of them saying that the NHS had similar gatherings during the pandemic, even though no one has ever found evidence for this
This tweet from Liz Truss, the narcissist’s narcissist, gives the flavour:
And Oliver Dowden aka Wokeboy Slim also got his oar in, as always:
There’s a lot more where this came from, and all of it has the same aim: to save Johnson and their own careers by depicting Partygate as a trivial distraction from the real business of government that they are supposedly focused on. These liars and conmen would have us believe that Johnson and his cronies are serious people, and that those of us who are repulsed by their arrogance, superficiality and dishonesty are preventing them from being as serious as they can be.
Nowhere in the midst of this toxic gaslighting and grovelling self-abasement is there any recognition of Johnson’s brazen and persistent lying in the House of Commons, which ought to be a resignation matter in itself.
All of these hirelings have abandoned any claims to integrity that they may once have had in order to save a man who has no integrity at all. We can ponder their motives for doing this, but we should never be fooled into believing that Johnson represents anything like serious government.
Dereliction of Duty
Consider the Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s report ‘Missing in action: UK leadership and the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was published the day before Sue Gray’s report.
This report received almost no attention compared to partygate, despite its utterly damning verdict on the UK government’s performance in Afghanistan last year.
Among other things, it accuses the Johnson government of failing to plan for the evacuation even though the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan took place eighteen months after Trump announced that US troops would withdraw. It excoriates officials from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the National Security Council officials for their lack of preparation , their incoherent priorities about who was to be evacuated, their failure to store information on local Afghan staff eligible for withdrawal.
The report notes that the FCDO’s top officials were all on leave during the evacuation and did not return until it was over. It also suggests that Johnson himself ordered the controversial evacuation of staff and animals from the animal charity Nowzad, and accuses Johnson’s officials - and by extension the Prime Minister himself - of lying when when they claimed otherwise. Amongst the ‘deep problems with Government decision-making’ pertaining to the Nowzad evacuation, the report noted the following:
First, that it allowed its resources to be absorbed by media campaigns, rather than focusing on the humanitarian and strategic implications of the crisis. Second, that it made important policy decisions through informal, unaccountable means, which were later impossible to trace.
These criticisms can be applied to what the government has done in regards to Brexit, the pandemic, and pretty much anything it does for that matter. The committee also observed that
Parliament can only perform its role of holding Government to account if it can be confident that it is receiving honest answers to its questions. The relationship between the Committee and department relies on a degree of candour and rigour, and this appears to have been sadly missing, with the integrity of the government’s senior leaders called into question. Officials should not be expected to engage -nor be complicit-in obscuring the facts in order to shield others from political accountability.
It’s here that discussions of nibbles, snacks and parties overlap with the abandonment of thousands of people to death, persecution and torture; where any claims to the seriousness of Johnson’s government are revealed to be nothing more than fraudulent puffery.
Because a serious government would not have allowed this debacle to occur. Its officials would have resigned en masse. Yet none of them did. Not the foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, not the prime minister for Afghanistan, Lord Ahmad, nor the Foreign Office’s permanent secretary, Sir Philip Barton.
Why should they resign, when the Prime Minister hasn’t asked them to, and won’t resign himself? Why did the cross-party committee that compiled this report claim that it had lost confidence in these officials to tell the truth? Why did the committee have to rely on whistleblowers to find out how much the UK government had let down the people who had held responsibility for?
These were not questions that anyone should hold their breath waiting to be asked. Not from the Tory MPS and the Tory commentariat who spent the last 24 hours gaslighting the public, or the newspapers that have covered for Johnson again and again.
As Mark Anthony would say, these are all honourable men, or so they would have us believe, and for the time being our fate is in their hands, and this country will continue its headlong descent. Its weak institutions will continue to crumble and lose credibility. Its old boys club rules will continue to be bent and broken.
This isn’t just the result of one man’s horrendous personality. Johnson may, in the long run, have done us a favour by exposing the weaknesses of the system that he treats with such contempt.
His rottenness is merely a symptom of a deeper rot that is spreading through all the institutions of government, and will continue to contaminate us until Johnson and his underlings are finally removed from power, and the country is released from the death grip of the Tory Party before it chokes to death on flags and bunting.