As the senior civil servant Sue Gray reacted this weekend to calls from the Metropolitan police for her to leave out the most sensitive sections of her report into parties in Downing Street, there was some relief among those close to Boris Johnson. “They think the heat is off them a bit, is the impression I get,” said a respected figure on the Conservative backbenches. “I think this could at least buy them some time.”
But at the heart of government things remained chaotic and tense on Saturday. Confusion was rife, and no one knew exactly what would happen next. The Cabinet Office has been handling all matters relating to the Gray report and No 10 was still in the dark about when she would hand over the neutered version to the prime minister.
The two parts of Downing Street were said by one senior Whitehall source not to be talking to each other much as the drama reached its climax. “I have never known dysfunction like this,” said a former Tory cabinet minister. “They are in the same bloody building, they are part of the same operation.”
If Johnson was feeling more relaxed at his Chequers country retreat, the same could not be said about large numbers of Conservative MPs. Both among those who want the prime minister gone and those who have yet to make up their minds (who together almost certainly comprise a majority) the feelings were of deepening frustration and mounting despair.
Ideally no Tory MP would want to be heading into a leadership contest now, with the pandemic only just easing, a cost of living crisis looming, tensions over Russia and Ukraine rising and local elections around the corner in May.
But given the way the “partygate” allegations had been piling up, most had formed the view that the Gray report – published in full – would at least blow the whole thing open and establish the facts.
Depending on Gray’s findings and her tone, Johnson would either face a leadership challenge, or the 54 letters from MPs needed to trigger one would not materialise and he could carry on. “Published in full it would allow us to draw a line under the whole disaster, one way or the other. It would be the denouement,” said a Tory MP from the undecided camp.
Now, however, the fear is that the Gray report will be too limited in scope to deliver the full facts, or much clarity, and that judgment on Johnson will have to be postponed for weeks or months until the police investigation into partygate is concluded.
In that time, Tory MPs say, leadership speculation will not go away. Far from it. Rather, it will just intensify but without a contest being under way.
As one former minister put it: “The danger is that everything that happens between now and when the police report comes will be viewed through the prism of leadership and leadership ambitions, not according to the merits of the actual proposals themselves. That is a terrible position for a government to be in.”
Increasingly Tory MPs are criticising the Met for allowing the impression to be formed that it was somehow in cahoots with No 10 in trying to get Johnson off the hook.
The former cabinet minister David Davis, who has already called for Johnson to quit, told the Observer yesterday that there were no good legal arguments for the Met to call for Gray to redact sensitive parts of her report and that the resulting delay in publishing the facts would mean the prime minister being “tortured” for weeks or months more, rather than being put out of his misery soon.
“What we have now is a circumstance where the benefits of the Sue Gray report – that it would bring the thing to a conclusion and then draw a line under it – are all destroyed,” Davis said.
“There is no logic behind the police’s request and there is a strong public interest for Sue Gray to publish in full. Otherwise the prime minister could still be being tortured in months and months time.
“People will think it is contrived which I am sure it is not, actually. It does put the Tory party in very poor position. It puts the government in a very poor position. This death by a thousand cuts has got to come to an end in order to allow the government to do its job properly and have the bandwidth to do it. It is a real problem.”
Conservative MPs were dreading a leadership contest but were steeling themselves for one. Without a candidate around whom a clear majority of Tories could quickly unite, they knew the process would inevitably be messy and divisive.
The two cabinet ministers talked of as the most likely successors to Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, occupy two of the great offices of state, chancellor and foreign secretary respectively, and would be pitted into a fight for the top job at a time of serious economic problems and international tensions – issues which should be uppermost in their minds.
Even those who believe Johnson can survive – and who want him to – don’t think delaying the moment of truth will necessarily help. “It’s an f’ing mess. That is all I know,” one Johnson sympathiser said.
Another former minister warned that Dominic Cummings would be relishing the chance to fill the void with yet more claims while the police worked on their report.
“The first reaction of people was that this was good news for Boris,” the senior Tory said. “But now we have the prospect of damaging headlines for an indefinite period ahead.”
