January 31st, 2022.
The toast gets higher.
The Sue Gray report into Downing Street and its parties/gatherings was published today. Except that it wasn’t. A document was presented to the Prime Minister which was described as an update. This was placed in Parliament’s library and Johnson attended to make a statement to the House, which was followed by questions and a debate.
The upshot of all this is that he has told the House that they must wait for the conclusion of the police investigations and then the final report from Sue Gray. In response to questions as to whether he will present the final report to the House he was non-committal. This flies in the face of his previous statements where he assured the House that the report would be presented to Parliament in full.
By 6 pm tonight he had realised that this was a major error and committed to releasing the report in full. Whether he eventually does this is a matter for conjecture as no one really believes him anymore. The update pointed out that there were 16 “gatherings, 4 of which were commented on and the other 12 were not commented on because they were subject to ongoing police investigations. The Metropolitan police confirmed that they have received more than 300 photographs and over 500 pages of documents from the Gray enquiry which have not been made public.
During the debate, Andrew Mitchell (Conservative) stood up and said that he was withdrawing his support for Johnson. Ian Blackford, the leader of the Scottish National Party in Westminster questioned the Prime Minister and accused him of misleading Parliament. He also called him a liar. After being requested several times to withdraw these statements he refused, and the Speaker immediately threw him out of the House.
Johnson, as expected was full of bluster and waffle. Keir Starmer, the Labour leader gave probably his best performance in the House, delivering measured, fact-based questioning. Johnson’s only response was to waffle, deflect and ignore key parts of the questioning.
The Labour side of the House gave him a good kicking as did some of his own party, the most noticeable being Theresa May, the previous Prime Minister. The feedback from the Conservatives is that Johnson misread the situation and got the tone wrong.
Sue Gray’s heavily redacted report only ran to 12 pages, and below are a few comments from the report.
At a time when ministers were asking citizens to severely limit their lives, “some of the behaviour surrounding these gatherings is difficult to justify”, she wrote.
Some gatherings “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”, she said, adding: “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.”
In a restrained comment on the Met, she said “Unfortunately, this necessarily means that I am extremely limited in what I can say about those events and it is not possible at present to provide a meaningful report setting out and analysing the extensive factual information I have been able to gather.”
She went on to comment on alcohol usage in Downing Street “The excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace at any time. Steps must be taken to ensure that every government department has a clear and robust policy in place covering the consumption of alcohol in the workplace.”
She said that staff felt uncomfortable about raising issues at work “No member of staff should feel unable to report or challenge poor conduct where they witness it.”
Questioning the ever-increasing staffing levels at Downing Street she said, “the structures that support the smooth operation of Downing Street, however, have not evolved sufficiently to meet the demands of this expansion.”
Leadership structures “are fragmented and complicated”.
As a final comment, she said “A number of these gatherings should not have been allowed to take place or to develop in the way that they did. There is significant learning to be drawn from these events which must be addressed immediately across government.”
In civil service terms, the language used was, in its own way, extremely strong. One can only imagine what the unredacted report would look like.
There is still a whiff of something fishy here and the late intervention of the Met becomes more embarrassing by the day. Johnson is by no means off the hook, but I guarantee that he will use the weeks until the publication of the action to be undertaken by the Met and Sue Gray’s full report to attack the anti-Johnson factions within the Conservative party. He and his allies will use whatever means they deem necessary.