Multiple parties (or ‘gatherings’) held in Downing Street during lockdowns should not have been allowed to take place or to develop in the way that they did as Sue Gray reported, and they may well yet herald the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership. One has to wonder why Johnson and those around him could have behaved so brazenly and acted with such a sense of impunity. These parties might well have been crimes and some of them are currently under police investigation. Arguably they were worse than crimes, they were a series of big blunders. Why had no one imagined for a moment how these parties would look to the public, if the press discovered such parties’ existence, when the country was under lockdown and restrictions meaning people were dying alone? Why did they think that information about these parties wouldn’t come out, given the general leakiness of Westminster? Was the reason imprudence or impudence? If I hazard a guess, it was probably quite a lot of both, mingled with another lethal ingredient, incompetence.
