Boris Johnson was sitting in his wood-paneled office at his farmhouse in Checkers when he read the e-mail his party feared. It was shortly after 4 pm on Tuesday, and the prime minister was ready to begin a half-hour briefing before a phone call to Joe Biden on a secure transatlantic line.
The e-mail of the Sofia police, transmitted by his lawyer, is written in dry law. “On June 19, 2020, at 10 Downing Street Office, between 2:00 pm and 3:00 pm, you participated in a gathering of two or more people indoors at 10 Downing Street Office,” it said.
This was the date of his birthday, when his wife Carrie and others had arranged a celebration during the first blockade of Covid. If it was a fun birthday present from the Metro, it didn’t look like one.
Mr Johnson had already been informed hours earlier that he and Rishi Sunak would be sent notices of fixed sentences. But according to formal police trials, none of them had any idea what the law violations were. They were told that they would have to wait for the details of the letters to be delivered by post.
“The message [from the police] was, check your post tomorrow or the day after. They had simply told the world that he would get something, and they expected the world to wait a day or two or every time a second-class Royal Mail appeared to say exactly what it was about. It was unsustainable. “
At the request of Johnson’s lawyer, police sent an email stating the crime. Johnson did not initially plan to make a public statement. “We have always intended either to make a statement to the House or to hold a press conference if the House does not meet,” said one insider. “But how can you hold a press conference when you don’t even know what the events are [the police] are we talking? “
Now the prime minister finally understood the details, there had to be a public response, but a conversation with Biden scheduled for 4.30pm meant he had to stay in Checkers and could not return to number 10 for a media briefing. As soon as the conversation with the President of the United States ended, he made his statement of 314 words about the birthday party.
BBC Deputy Political Editor Vicky Young was told to arrive at 5.30pm for a joint TV clip in Checkers to receive the prime minister’s first reaction to the news of his fine. To her surprise, he began by reading carefully from the script. “It never occurred to me that this could be a violation of the rules,” he said.
Although Johnson usually speaks without notes on such videos, he referred to it as a mini-press conference on Downing Street, where he starts with a statement and then answers questions, said one of the aides.
Young was initially given three questions, then bargained for four, and, like all stubborn reporters, pushed him on. Would he resign? Wasn’t his power to tell others to obey the law undermined? Did he take responsibility for a total of 50 police fines? Hadn’t he lied to parliament? Didn’t he understand his own laws? Will he face more fines? After her fifth question, she felt a pat on the back to say that the session was over because the prime minister had to leave.
Johnson, speaking in front of an 18th-century landscape painting, The Russell and Roar Families with Fishing Rods and Game, looked like a man who felt persecuted. Perhaps appropriate for critics of the prime minister, artist Charles Phillips was a friend of William Hogarth, whose famous “Progress of Rake” depicts the fall of a party-goer who breaks the law.
More fines now seem inevitable, not least because the birthday collection was the shortest and is considered at the softer end of the spectrum of events that occurred during the blockade. But Johnson’s allies insist the numerous fines will not change political calculations.
“If you’re caught driving at 35 mph four times, that doesn’t mean you’ve driven 140 mph. That doesn’t mean you’re really life-threatening, because the cumulative effect of your entire speeding in 30 mph zones is 140 pmh, right? said one.
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“It may be a pure mathematical trick, but morally and legally it is not. And if you look at the nature of the event when a person walks into an office just outside of his for nine minutes, then that doesn’t mean the second one is crossing some new threshold, does it?
Johnson definitely had the support of the cabinet. The first prime minister to give a public response after the noon news of the prime minister’s fine was Brandon Lewis, secretary of Northern Ireland. He tweeted at 4pm that the third series of Derry Girls on Channel 4 came out that day. He sent a message to his colleague that he was “just getting to work,” along with a smiling emoji saint.
Lewis later tweeted his full support for the prime minister and chancellor, but it was Culture Minister Nadine Doris who won the award for the first cabinet minister to go public with her support, even before Johnson’s statement. He offered a full apology and “meets the priorities of the British people,” she said. Although it took Sunak several hours to make it clear that he remained in place, the demonstration of loyalty was eventually made.
Doris and other ministers retweeted Johnson’s own tweet that afternoon, revealing that he had informed Biden of his trip to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky just days earlier.
And for the prime minister’s supporters, his 36-hour trip to the Ukrainian capital remained the most important event of the week. This, plus a long-planned “lattice” message 10 deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, was seen as proof that he was doing his daily job. Partygate’s failures, countered by political resistance, also look like the current story of the coming weeks.
Johnson had received strict orders not to miss any hint of a trip to Ukraine, keeping a poker face, when asked at a press conference number 10 by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz if he intended to visit Zelensky in person. “We are trying to help people come from Ukraine,” Johnson told a German reporter.
Boris Johnson fined for violating blocking rules (Photo: Marc Ward / PA)
In fact, the request to visit Kyiv had been with Zelensky for weeks and had already been approved. Traveling with only one Downing Street assistant with military experience, he traveled by plane, train and road to Ukraine and met with Zelensky on Saturday.
Unlike a tightly controlled visit by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Johnson went on an impromptu walk in the capital to help his friend show the world how something like normalcy is returning to the streets. “He had no idea who he was going to meet. “There are not many politicians on the planet who will take this political risk, let alone security,” said one of the allies.
The Ukrainian embassy in London announced the news with a tweet called “Surprise”. In the end, Johnson’s trip was widely praised even by some of his critics, especially after the Ukrainian government posted a video of the walk on Twitter. A man praised Britain’s contribution to his country’s military efforts, while a woman donated ceramic roosters to Johnson and Zelensky, a symbol of Ukraine’s challenge as a potter’s rooster remained on a chest after Russia’s Borodyanka bombing.
On his return to the United Kingdom, Johnson took the roosters with him to the Checkers. On Monday, his spokesman said he intended to “relax a little and spend some time with his family” for a few days in a rural shelter. He had a short time before his speech in Kent on Thursday to coincide with another secret trip abroad – that of Interior Minister Priti Patel to Rwanda, where she would unveil a controversial new plan to deport male migrants who crossed the English Channel illegally. .
Back in the UK, Wednesday’s confirmation of rising 7 per cent inflation sparked a new “cost of living crisis” among Tory supporters, many campaigning in their seats ahead of the May 5th local elections.
One of the benches confided: “Some of us have rumored Boris, but the people in our local parties are not. Many of them still love it. The stance will fall only if we lose advisers who have pushed to be elected. That’s when the scales can fall out of their eyes. “
A former cabinet minister said the Partygate fines, with the threat of new ones and the full report of the head of public service ethics chief Sue Gray, would make life very uncomfortable. “It simply came to our notice then. This is when it dawns on the young [the 2017 and 2019 election intakes] that things will move.
Boris Johnson meets with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in Kyiv (Photo: Ukrainian Presidency / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“This is an irreversible, corrosive damage. Local elections may be mixed, but when we have the Sue Gray report, when Ukraine is far from the road, people will understand that we cannot go on with it.
“Things can develop when one of two things happens in Ukraine. Either the war is being decided or people are just getting bored of the military pornography we watch all the time. And this can happen until the summer.
“There must also be another fraud of Boris, he is probably already in the queue to enter the public space.”
A former minister said Sunak’s quick death helped Johnson. “It helped him with the lack of candidates. His strategy – no matter how critical I am of it – to have short poppies around him works.
“Come on? It is too vague. Earthquake has too few friends. Hunting can be too weak. Tugendhat has a fan club, but also an antifen club.
“But to be honest, looking at the Western leadership of Biden, Macron and Scholz, you don’t have to do much to be better than them to influence Ukraine.
A former cabinet minister said: “Some of my …
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