They broke the rules they set for everyone else. Then the prime minister lied and lied again to parliament. “Never before in history has a prime minister broken the law,” Chris Bryant, chair of both the standards and privileges committees, told me this afternoon. “These aren’t just rules; they broke the law.” Johnson’s chancellor, asked if he had attended two Downing Street Christmas parties, told the Commons: “No, Mr Speaker, I did not attend any parties.”
Breaking the law and lying about it or misleading the house would have seen any other prime minister and chancellor resign instantly. But nothing can make them go if they cling to their posts. Only their own MPs can oust them, with a flurry of those famous letters to the backbench 1922 committee chair. There should be queues forming outside Sir Graham Brady’s door right now, but don’t hold your breath. Instead, you hear calculating perplexity: without them, who would be our winning leader? But for the sake of their reputations, these MPs should only consider the probity of their party.
More sententiously, they pretend concern for the country: a war is no time to ditch a leader. Really? In both world wars, inadequate leaders were dumped unceremoniously for someone better suited for that serious and decisive role. None of them selected Boris Johnson expecting him to make a war leader. God knows how long the war in Ukraine may last, but the time may come, before long, when citizens across Nato countries will be asked to make sacrifices, in energy, in supply lines, in taxes. An immoral lawbreaker who has failed to acknowledge the grievousness of his own behaviour is hardly the man to call on others to tighten their belts in the national interest.
This government pretends Covid has gone away, because it wishes it had. It has chosen to ignore the hundreds of deaths a day, the hospitals and ambulance services overwhelmed, pretending it’s all over. But wherever Johnson and Rishi Sunak go, if ever again they dare face an unscripted audience, someone will stand up and say, “My mother died alone, because we obeyed the law” or “My children had to say goodbye to their dying mother on a tablet, because we all obeyed the law while you held 12 parties.” Imagine trying to dodge every ordinary citizen who might have a story to tell during an election campaign.
Bryant has a constituent, a university student, who was fined £2,100 for attending – not organising – a party during lockdown. Many others will wonder why these two got off so lightly. To the hundreds of thousands with painful Covid stories, those Downing Street parties will always be an affront, not a mere bagatelle as the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg pretend. And for none of them will all this fade away by the next election.
Tory MPs need to hear loud and clear from all their electors. They need a frightening avalanche of emails and letters, today, right now. Nothing else will stir them to do what their party would certainly have done at any other point in its history.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
