'Johnson would throw his entire team under a bus to survive Partygate'
After a clip about the reshuffle in Downing Street earlier this year, Kuenssberg is told by Will Walden, a former staff member of Boris Johnson’s when he was mayor of London says that he does “burn” people and because of his personality as a “loner” he finds “burning people” easy.
An official said: “He’s a nice guy, but he knows where the bodies are. He will be cut-throat to protect his own interests.”
When asked what he would do to protect his interests, she said: “I think he would throw his entire team under the bus to survive this.”
Here’s a round-up of today’s politics news in the UK, the night before it is expected that civil servant Sue Gray will publish her report into lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street.
A BBC Panorama documentary has heard that parties in Downing Street were so cramped that at one point, people were forced to sit on each others laps.
Officials, given anonymity, said Boris Johnson would “throw his entire team under a bus” if it meant he would get past the Partygate scandal intact.
They said that they felt Johnson had implicitly given them permission to hold events, because of his attendance. “He was grabbing a glass for himself,” one said.
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has asked the Metropolitan police why Johnson was not fined for attending Lee Cain’s leaving drinks on 13 November 2020, from which photographs have emerged. Others who attended were fined.
One rebel Tory thinks the number of letters submitted to the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee demanding a vote of no confidence in Johnson is now in the high 40s, the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope reports. The threshold for a ballot to take place is 54.
And away from Partygate:
Jonathan Brearley, the Ofgem chief executive, told MPs on the Commons business committee that he expects the energy price cap to rise to about £2,800 in October.
The Resolution Foundation thinktank says raising the energy price cap to about £2,800, would almost double the number of families in fuel poverty.
Former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick said he believed Rishi Sunak and the Treasury would come forward with another “significant” support package to help families through the cost of living crisis.
Labour says it will vote against the Northern Ireland Troubles bill because it equated soldiers with terrorists.
British officials did not require Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to sign a forced confession before her departure from Iran, but instead advised her that the Iranians would not allow her to leave unless she did so, the UK’s Middle East minister, Amanda Milling, told MPs.
Looking back, an official who worked in No 10 said: “I think for everybody it has been very distressing and shaming.
“The whole period was traumatic. It was very difficult to work on every single day. We were learning that people were dying in hospital beds and people were dying needlessly.
“We were worried about making mistakes and getting these big calls wrong and working through it.
“It was quite difficult to look back at that period now and thinking this is what will define it. Not the vaccine programmes, or food parcels for shielding people. It’ll be, what were you doing on 20 May in the garden?”
Afterwards, speaking to Kuenssberg, Iain Duncan Smith said Boris Johnson should survive the scandal because of the problems with the cost of living crisis and Ukraine and that there was a need for leadership.
It’s now on to the unhappiness from staff at Downing Street after being fined.
“A lot of these young members of staff from across Downing Street that were fined feel that when they went to the events they didn’t think they were breaking the rules because the prime minister was at them. Some of the most senior civil servants in the country were at them, and were indeed even organising them,” said one official.
“I think it has been a big surprise for a lot of people, that after being told they would be protected by senior people, including the prime minister, he stood up in the House of Commons and essentially implied he was misled by essentially some very junior people, whose job it wouldn’t have been to police these events.”
Another said that they would come in to work sometimes and find bins overflowing or empty bottles left on tables.
The party in Downing Street on the night before Prince Philip’s funeral is now being discussed.
The official who was there said there were people from different departments, press, policy and speechwriters, with about 20-25 present in total.
“It was a general party, it just happened to have someone leaving at it.”
They then went into the gardens after the noise continued, with some staff ending up staying the night at No 10. “I think it’s unforgivable,” she added.
“It’s like sticking two fingers up to the British public,” Iain Duncan Smith said.
'Johnson would throw his entire team under a bus to survive Partygate'
After a clip about the reshuffle in Downing Street earlier this year, Kuenssberg is told by Will Walden, a former staff member of Boris Johnson’s when he was mayor of London says that he does “burn” people and because of his personality as a “loner” he finds “burning people” easy.
An official said: “He’s a nice guy, but he knows where the bodies are. He will be cut-throat to protect his own interests.”
When asked what he would do to protect his interests, she said: “I think he would throw his entire team under the bus to survive this.”
An official who was at the gathering pictured outside in the garden of 10 Downing Street said: “If the PM or his chief of staff set a rule for the building that there was to be no alcohol, then it wouldn’t have happened.
“In a way it happened because people were happy for it to happen.”
After a question by Kuenssberg about whether it struck people as odd that these events were taking place, the official adds: “I suspect it went through everyone’s minds because it was so different to what everyone else was doing.”
Another official told Panorama: “I think he [Johnson] is very adept at believing his version of the truth. Obviously he’s often referred to as a liar, but it’s more complicated than that. I think he’s very good at retrofitting events and genuinely believing the conclusion he has come to.
“I think he would pass a lie detector test asking: ‘Do you think you were breaking the rules?’ But I also believe he must have known that some of these events were not in the rules.”
An official said that Boris Johnson’s was slow to realise the danger of Covid. “He was even making jokes about kung flu,” and only shifted when he got Covid himself and he saw footage of people dying in Lombardy, Italy, before the virus got a grip on the UK.
“Trying to get him to wash his hands was hard enough.”
Another said “he was a freedom loving Conservative at his core and that became something he had to keep in check.”
“The majority of people need to follow these rules, and that’s the right message to send, but it stopped short of him almost seeing himself as part of that majority. In that building in his general interactions, it felt like business as usual.”
The official added that it was “business as usual” in Downing Street, with no extra rules including people wearing face masks or social distancing.
She said it felt like Johnson had given the events permission to take place. “He was there, he may have just been popping through on the way to his flat but that’s what would happen. He wasn’t there saying this shouldn’t be happening, or can everyone break up and go home, can everyone socially distance or put masks on, no he wasn’t telling anyone that.
In a clip that was released before it aired tonight, one former official said that they were in disbelief when Boris Johnson denied that there were parties. “We’ve been with him this entire time, we knew that the rules had been broken, we knew that these parties happened. It is quite clear that he lied to parliament.”
She mentions regular press office “wine-time Fridays” drinks at 4pm on a Friday.
Another ex-staff member said it was “pretty typical” for the press team to have drinks in the office with a lot of “young sociable people working there ... who lived alone.” Through an actor’s voice, he added that it “wasn’t unusual” for the prime minister to be there. “He seemed to be a believer in letting his staff let their hair down a bit. It speaks to his temperament and leadership style, he wants to be liked by everybody.”
The documentary hears that a security guard was laughed at when he tried to stop the party of 30 people who had gathered for former director of communications Lee Cain’s leaving party.
The Panorama documentary on Partygate, fronted by BBC’s former political editor Laura Kuenssberg is broadcasting now on BBC Two.
Several figures are set to appear including former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative MP Caroline Noakes and Labour MP Wes Streeting. Former officials from No 10 will also be interviewed anonymously.
More on former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick’s comments to Andrew Marr on LBC this evening, where he suggested support for people faced by mounting costs will be forthcoming.
Marr asked whether VAT cuts, warm fuel allowances and increases to universal credit were being considered by Sunak and the Treasury.
Jenrick replied: “I think all of those things will be under active consideration now and given the scale of what we’re going to encounter, or many people in society going to encounter, it’s going to have to be an intervention of some significance, but you’ll have to wait days or a couple of weeks. I don’t think it’ll be very long before the chancellor will come back and set out his plans.”
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