Comment: Two months is an awfully long time in politics and this wait is getting ridiculous

If a week is a long time in politics a couple of months is an eternity and it certainly feels like the Downing Street partygate saga has been rumbling on since the beginning of time.

It’s hard to believe the country has only been getting near-daily updates about lockdown revelries since The Mirror’s Pippa Crerar started reporting on them at the end of November – only two months?

It’s equally hard to believe that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has held on for so long in the face of growing public anger over claims about the shenanigans that went on under his watch – it’s been two months!

And yet here we are, still awaiting with bated breath the findings of Sue Gray, a senior civil servant who has gone from Whitehall obscurity to household name since being asked to investigate the claims at the beginning of this month.

With her remit growing as evidence of more and more parties has been unearthed, the exact timing of Gray's report has become ever harder to predict – not least because the Metropolitan Police has now begun a criminal investigation into some of the allegations.

Though it looked on Friday that that investigation might kick Gray’s one into the long grass, it now seems likely that she might report this week after all. Will she? Won’t she? Will she redact? Won’t she? No one – possibly not even Gray herself – seems to know.

For Johnson and his supporters, who have used ‘waiting for the Sue Gray report’ to deflect all questions since partygate began, the delay will have given them a little more time to get their PR in order.

Johnson’s own claim that he did attend a 20 May 2020 party but “believed implicitly that this was a work event” rather than a do - and Tory MP Conor Burns’ assertion that the Prime Minister had been “ambushed with a cake” on the day of his 56th birthday party – was hardly crisis management at its finest.

A serious matter like the Sue Gray report is going to warrant a serious, well thought out response.

Creative comms aside, given how long partygate has been going on for and how lurid some of the claims have been – suitcases of booze dragged back from a local supermarket, wine fridges smuggled into Number 10, DJ sessions in the basement - it is easy to lose sight of what the public anger is all about.

But this is not a story about people getting cross with a Prime Minister who apparently turned a blind eye as his staff partied on down; this is a story about people getting cross with a Prime Minister who apparently turned a blind eye as his staff flouted strict Covid rules his government enacted and the electorate followed to the letter. And in that sense at least the Prime Minister could find himself on relatively safe ground.

Barrister Adam Wagner, an expert on Covid regulations, told The Times newspaper last week that while it seems there was “no work justification” for the parties that took place the day before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral - which Johnson did not attend - the Prime Minister may not have broken the rules in attending some of the ones he did go to.

Speaking about the 15 May 2020 party that took place in the Downing Street garden, Wagner said: “The Prime Minister and [his then fiancée, now wife] Carrie Symonds wouldn’t have breached the rules because they were in their own garden. The rules were tightened later to close that loophole. If the staff were outside of their home without a reasonable excuse — of doing something which was reasonably necessary for work — then that would breach the requirements. The ‘gatherings’ rule did not apply because it was not a public place.”

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Johnson – who will undoubtedly have been given legal advice as the story has unfolded - has been so confident about brazening it out. A little bit more humility about the fact he is ultimately responsible for what goes on in Downing Street may have gone down better with the public, though. As First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said in an interview with The Shift podcast last week, a little bit of imposter syndrome – self-reflection, self-doubt – would do the Prime Minister “the world of good”. 

Johnson has always been something of a Marmite character, with his supreme self-confidence endearing him to just as many people as it has turned off. Regardless of what Sue Gray’s investigation has uncovered - and regardless of who the Tories put up to defend him – with the Scottish Conservatives turning against him, rumours of no-confidence letters circling him and public outrage chasing him, there is a real sense that Johnson may already have lost the crowd.

And, as all good showmen know, when you’ve lost the room you either have to win it back fast or you have to get off the stage. With even a modicum of imposter syndrome, the PM might have realised that by now.

Two months; it’s an awfully long time in politics.