That’s shocking.
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Oh dear, Johnson has said he’ll ask Simon Case to look into claims of Downing Street Christmas parties last year.
Feel sorry for Simon, it feels like he’s constantly having to look into potential impropriety regarding Downing Street.
When I next see him I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop myself from asking whether he was there… 
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Bet Mr J Pie is recording now……
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So Johnson wants us to believe that there was a party in the building where he works, but he didn’t know about it and everyone told him that it didn’t happen. He’s got away with this sort of thing for so long that he thinks people will believe anything. He may even be right.
Surely there’s a point where people get so fed up with being lied to, taken for granted and condescended to that they turn. Incidents like this only serve the narrative that they’re all the same and feed cynicism about the whole system. Johnson and his cronies have no real commitment to the principles of democracy and are purely driven by self interest, just like their counterparts across the Atlantic.
Not sure we will get there.
There were callers on the radio this morning saying that they voted Conservative at the last election but cannot bring themselves to support a Johnson-led government going forward. Some say because of this, some citing this as being the last straw. Fair to say that many also said that they had no issues with their constituency MP, this was a judgement against the leadership. In those circumstances, there’s bound to be another very strong back-bench reaction on this. They’ve barely finished licking their wounds following the Paterson clusterfuck. I suspect that Johnson’s support within the party is at an all-time low.
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What I don’t get about this is that in the mock press conference (we used to have loads of mock trials at university so this is fairly familiar to me), the question put in rehearsal is “I’ve just seen reports on twitter that there was a Downing Street Christmas party on Friday night, do you recognise those reports?” This is followed up with “Would the Prime Minister condone having a Christmas party?”
Now, these are exactly the sort of ‘made-up’ scenarios that would be typically put in a mock rehearsal, just to see how someone would deal with something like this. Now, was this scenario made up or were there actual “reports on twitter that there was a Downing Street Christmas party on Friday night” from December last year? If so, what did the actual journalists say about this at the following Downing Street briefing? Was it even raised at all? If so, what was the response at the time?
I don’t really get why the mock press briefing is making waves here. The way she flounders, she’s obviously shit at her job - even if rehearsals are meant to iron out the crinkles in any potential responses to questions from journalists.
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From the Guardian Article re why she was hired in the first place;
“Every metric said she’s not good enough to do the job,” said the person involved in hiring process. They claimed Stratton was the personal choice of Boris Johnson, who overruled the wishes of other staff members, possibly because Stratton was at that point close to his then fiancee, now wife, Carrie Johnson.
Surely he can’t continue for too much longer, and when he goes, hopefully a lot of the dross goes too.
Surely she was also the favoured choice of Sunak too, given their connection? What is plain is that even though she may have been the personal choice of the PM (and perhaps Sunak), she clearly was not actually deemed up to it as we never saw her. Before yesterday, I’d never heard of her!
Certainly does not reflect well on his judgement, even if there was enough sense to not actually use her in the role for which she had been recruited!
There were no actual rumours at the time, but it seems clear that the people in the room were aware that they were talking about something that had taken place. The fact that they knew it would be controversial and were joking about it just adds to the impression of cynical privilege and lack of respect for the public.
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She is a close personal friend of Boris’s. When she was appointed there was a bit of a hoo-ha because of footage of an interview she gave while at the BBC where she deliberately tried to misrepresent a lone mother as being a benefit scrounger.
https://www.eastlondonlines.co.uk/2012/09/bbc-apologises-to-single-mother-humiliated-on-newsnight/
See this is it for me. It’s very clear from the others in the room effectively “coaching” the answers that the correct answer to the second question (“Would the Prime Minister condone having a Christmas party?”) was an emphatic “No!”. And also that the answer to whether there was a party, not just Stratton’s reply “I went home…” (which conveniently enough seems to be Johnson’s answer now (that he wasn’t there), could have been along the lines of “It wasn’t a party, it was cheese and wine”…
So, assuming that something did happen, was it just nibbles and people then fucked off or did it turn into a proper boozy Christmas party affair? I think the public would be a lot more forgiving of the former. In that I think that they’d forgive the former but not at all the latter.
Of course, maybe it was the former but it’s subsequently been turned into the latter through innuendo? It’s nearly a year ago after all, why didn’t it come out at the time and who knows how many iterations any account of what happened has actually been through in the months that have since past?
Jesus. It’s just further confirmation that there are so many absolute morons at the heart of politics.
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I suppose the question of why it hasn’t come out earlier is very important, but equally the question of whether such a party even took place is paramount. Just because someone might have been hiding it as a potential bullet doesn’t mean that the party was justified.
I would hope not, because either way it was a flagrant contravention of the prevailing law at that time. The amount of fun (or not) is irrelevant.
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Sorry, deleted this tweet as part of the video had the rag’s name on it.
I’m not sure the rules were quite that cut and dried at the time. They did keep changing though! I thought you could justify a gathering on business grounds where reasonable precautions were taken? If it was to get a team together, in some form of recognition for a year well done, and it was wine and nibbles, a toast or two, then all fuck off…I thought that was OK?
I think the article I was reading on the BBC News site did explicitly state that if any party was held it was in contravention of the rules at that point in time, so I’m not sure what to believe.
I remember struggling to keep up with the rules at the time, and all that tier stuff! Some of the things I did at the start of the pandemic make me laugh now though.
I’d get home and before walking through the door I’d get undressed down to my underwear, put the clothes I’d been wearing in a bin liner, use hand sanitiser, use a special dettol fabric spray on my clothes, then walk in, put my clothes in the wash, then jump straight into the shower…and only afterwards would I then hug my kids…
We were so fucking paranoid.
I still take precautions but I can promise you I scaled that sort of operation back within a few weeks!
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There was a lockdown from 05 November to 02 December (Covid: MPs vote to back four-week England lockdown - BBC News), thereafter the three-tier system applied (Covid-19: Strengthened tier system for England after lockdown - BBC News), under which there was no permitted indoors mixing of households in Tier 2 and above.
London was in Tier 2 from the start of that system until 17 December, when it was moved to Tier 3 (and thereafter Tier 4). Under the legislation (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/1374/made) work was arguably a permitted exception to the household mixing rules, except that it had to be necessary, and working from home was required where possible (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/High_COVID-19_Alert_Level_Poster.jpg). There are no differences between Tier 2 and Tier 3 for those.
I would suggest that the question is therefore two-fold, i.e. was that meeting (if there was indeed an actual work meeting) necessarily in-person? Does any food/drink therefore suggest that any work-related activity had ceased at that point? The quip about “cheese and wine” is pretty incriminatory in my non-legally qualified opinion. It sounds as though they knew they did something wrong. Certainly the public perception will be to that effect.
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As a further update, the BBC has posted a timeline of the events (although I’m not sure where they sourced the information):
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Well, I think the only thing we can’t yet be sure of is precisely what happened.
Is this government rule-breaking or is it civil servants taking the piss by having an unauthorised piss up when Johnson or other ministers weren’t around?
It’s key to know a) what happened, b) who was there, c) whether it was authorised, and if so, by who d) what did people know about it, who knew about, when did they know about, have they said anything inconsistent with what they, at the time, knew or had been told?
Good luck with that Simon.
It occurs to me that actually the Cabinet Secretary might not be the appropriate person to investigate this. I can imagine a scenario where Johnson might not have known what was going on (that’s regrettably extremely easy to fathom) but not Case.