Downing Street staff who received fines for attending the same lockdown parties as Boris Johnson have reacted with fury after the prime minister escaped further sanctions on Thursday.
There was anger inside No10 as the Metropolitan Police concluded its Partygate investigation, leaving the prime minister with just one Fixed Penalty Notice compared to some junior staff who amassed as many as five — despite insider accounts that they had attended the same events.
The full findings of Sue Gray, the senior civil servant carrying out a wider report into the scandal, are now expected as soon as next week.
Police said a total of 126 fines were issued to 83 people over events spanning eight dates between May 2020 and April 2021.
Mr Johnson’s wife, Carrie, also received just one penalty linked to her husband’s birthday party on 19 June, 2020.
“It’s a joke,” one No10 source told The Independent. “He told people to ‘let their hair down’ and enjoy their drinks which they’d earned for ‘beating back the virus’.”
They said the prime minister had participated in socialising with officials and advisers in a manner that had been regarded as an endorsement of partying after work.
“He’s a man of little or no integrity,” they added, referring to his handling of the partygate affair.
A former Number 10 official who worked there during the pandemic said that the moment an official line was issued denying parties, “I gasped at the audacity of the lie”.
A spokesperson for No 10 declined to comment.
Legal experts have suggested that Mr Johnson may have escaped fines for attending lockdown busting parties as his workplace and home are combined within the Downing Street complex.
Covid-19 legislation, which changed numerous times during the period where the parties took place, means that Boris Johnson may have had a “reasonable excuse” in law that prevented him being fined.
However, the police may have taken a more lenient approach in the partygate probe, compared to other examples of enforcement.
Kirsty Brimelow QC, a human rights barrister who has represented people fighting Covid fines, told The Independent: “What I saw in cases up and down that country is that the ‘reasonable excuse’ part was never applied – police would only look at exemptions around the gathering itself.
She added that the police’s approach in the No 10 probe, of only issuing fines when confident of defending them in court, was different too: “FPNs would be issued if there was a reasonable belief of a breach, rather than having all the evidence ship-shape if it went to court.
“The Met has applied the regulations, but they’ve applied it in a way which is setting the police a higher bar before issuing a FPN,” Ms Brimelow said.
One Whitehall source said the investigation might have been “legally correct” but it was “morally ridiculous” as given the long hours many officials worked during the height of the pandemic, “we were all living at the office”.
The sense that the investigation had revealed one rule for bosses and another for workers was shared in 70 Whitehall Place, where a fine was given out for an event on 17 December, which cabinet secretary Simon Case was aware of, sources claimed.
Mr Case, the most senior civil servant in the UK, had not suggested the event was inappropriate and chatted to attendees, they said.
