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Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser who is now determined to be his nemesis, has posted about Partygate on his subscription-only Substack account this morning. Here are the key points.
I expect photos of the PM will emerge very quickly, within the next 24-48 hours. Any reasonable person looking at some of these photos will only be able to conclude that the PM obviously lied to the Commons, and possibly to the cops, and there is no reasonable story for how others were fined for event X but not him.
Some people told the police (but not Sue Gray, because they did not want the PM to read their evidence) that they had evidence regarding the organisation of illegal events from the flat. E.g apart from the ‘cake ambush’ there was a separate birthday party, uncovered by the media so far I think, that evening (which almost nobody knew about at the time, including me). There is a paper trail including WhatsApps from the flat. Sounds very bad for Boris/Carrie right? Surely that must be investigated? No! The police simply ignored it. Simple! PM cleared!
This process for checking lawfulness was particularly crucial in No10 because No10 itself was exempted from some regulations (e.g so it could be part of the mass testing pilot) so staff did not know exactly what rules applied internally from day to day. They weren’t told ‘it’s your job to keep tabs on all the rule changes’, they were told ‘the PPS has a process to ensure everything is lawful’. Obviously you knew *an actual party* (such as clearly happened in 2021) would be against the rules but many of the fines were for events that junior staff thought were a normal part of work and had been approved as lawful. Such officials’ view, reasonably, is: we were told X is lawful but now it turns out Martin [Reynolds, the PM’s principal private secretary] didn’t do his job and it wasn’t and we’re being fined, but if we’re being fined, how come the PM who was there and appointed Martin, and unlike us was told BYOB was NOT within the rules, isn’t fined?!’
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