Another Covid party revealed, another reason for Tories to abandon Johnson

Leaked messages have revealed another seemingly rule-breaking party in Downing Street. We already know that Boris Johnson’s birthday bash on the afternoon of June 19th landed him with a fine – making him the first serving Prime Minister in history to receive a fixed-penalty notice. Now, it has emerged that his partner Carrie Johnson hosted a second birthday event later the same day in their Downing Street flat. As with all these ‘partygate’ revelations, it’s important to keep in mind that at the time the Prime Minister was busy telling the public that gatherings of two or more people indoors were banned except for work purposes.

The party was not mentioned in the Sue Gray report – but the gathering has not been denied. Carrie Johnson’s spokesperson said the senior civil servant had been made aware of the messages “as part of her exhaustive inquiry into alleged breaches”. The messages have promoted Labour to demand an investigation. “This looks like yet another cover up,” Angela Rayner said. “The public deserve the truth about why the holding of a lockdown party in the Prime Minister’s flat on his own birthday has not been made public until now.”

The deputy Labour leader has written to Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, warning him that it is “crucial that you now advise the Prime Minister to come clean about his involvement” and requested that he “make public his correspondence pertaining to this event and his whereabouts” on the evening of June 19th. She has also demanded the messages be handed over to the privileges committee – Gray may have left this party out of her report but the parliamentary committee, which is expected to begin investigating whether Johnson misled the Commons by denying that Covid rules had been broken, could look into the second birthday shindig.

Gray published her report last Wednesday. Thursday brought an opportune U-turn on a windfall tax, with a government apparently now concerned about providing households with support against a backdrop of spiralling prices. The most significant thing about these latest revelations is perhaps that the leaked messages show how the partygate scandal will continue to dog the Prime Minister; we could see many more updates like this one over the coming months, especially as it is thought that the privileges committee investigation could take until October. As we see a steady drip, drip of reports of brazen rule-breaking behaviour continue to emerge, more and more Conservatives backbenchers will be weighing up what this means for their own electoral survival in a future general election.

On LabourList for readers today: you can catch up on the Sunday politics shows; Yasmin Qureshi MP argues that Labour can and must own ‘levelling up’ and define it on its own terms; and shadow minister Lyn Brown MP writes that the hunger crisis in East Africa should be a wake-up call for us all.