I know very little of UK politics, but I like to read The Guardian and Partygate looks like this huge scandal. Wasn’t it just that Boris Johnson attended a party during the pandemic? Why is it such a big deal that it’s causing all sorts of political drama?
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In a nutshell, yes that’s what happened.
But then when giving a statement when questioned on this in Parliament, he lied and played it down. This is where the drama unfolds…
A politician being dishonest? Big surprise there…
Anyway, ask the general public and most people are sick of hearing about it. But you know the media… they love clinging onto a scandal!
One reason was that it was during some of the most severe aspects of the British lockdown. A huge amount of people were saying goodbye to loved ones as they died over Zoom. Some of them can even say “you partied on the same day my mother died and I couldn’t be with her because of your rules”.
Additionally, he doubled down and lied quite a bit after the fact. Including in ways that preach ancient but still standing procedures and laws.
He attended multiple parties that broke the covid guidelines his Government implemented. He then lied about it to Parliament, which is a big deal.
Originally and on the face of it it was just a party (actually many parties) during lockdown, which was worthy of paying fines for, and which people got angry about as he was the one telling everyone to follow the rules and then breaking them half the evenings himself.
The scandal comes more from consistently lying about it, as well as a bunch of other scandals that happened around the same time (taking money from dodgy people, pardoning and sweeping sexual harassment claims from his friends and colleagues under the rug, among others), which have all got mixed in together under the same heading.
The stuff this week is specifically about being found guilty of lying about things related to these scandals in parliament, which is generally considered pretty serious by the judges (a bit like perjury or lying in court generally has serious sentence as well, no matter what it is about).
In general there is no single one large scandal, it is more of a “straw that broke the camels back” sort of situation, where the sheer number of small to mid sized scandals meant everyone eventually just got sick of the constant lies.
He lied about it, not just a bit but a lot. A very lot. You’re not supposed to lie to parliament, there are consequences if you do. Boris is meeting consequences for the first time in his life and pissing and whining.
During the worst parts of the pandemic the government made gatherings of people for things like parties illegal, to reduce the spread of the virus. This had a big effect on people who were isolated from friends and family. There’s an iconic picture of the queen sitting alone at the funeral of her husband.
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson attended multiple parties at his house. Johnson claimed various things in his defence. The police were not convinced, and fined him for breaking the law. He is, I believe, the only serving Prime Minister to be fined for breaking the law. (They only fined him for one party, probably due to some good lawyering and.)
So while much of the country was diligently following the rules and avoiding socialising, the Prime Minister was attending parties. His defence *at best* seems to be that the rules *his government* wrote weren’t clear enough to follow.
Now on top of that Johnson said a bunch of things to Parliament about these parties which he knew to be untrue. An important Commons committee found that he lied to Parliament, to them, and tried to obstruct their work. Among other things it recommended he be suspended from Parliament for 90 days.
This is not something that happens often, let alone to a former Prime Minister.
Johnson decided to resign as an MP before the report was published.
Now is this a huge scandal. Politician breaks the law his government wrote, lies about it. I don’t know about you but I think that *should* be a scandal. The thing about Johnson is that this is a man who already lost two jobs for lying. His opponents always expected this from him. His supporters already know he’s a liar and support him regardless.
Boris violated his own Governments restrictions to attend multiple parties and then lied about it.
You’re in the middle of the worst pandemic of the past 100 years and your Government is enforcing some of the most draconian restrictions in recent history.
People are having to say goodbye to their own loved ones over video chat. People are protesting restrictions, some are getting arrested and fined for violating them but all the while the leader of the Government who is supposed to be enforcing these rules and being an example to everyone is actually flagrantly ignoring the rules.
It looks very very bad
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There are several factors behind it. First, many politicians and journalists (including many members and supporters of the Conservative Party) have really never liked Johnson but supported him because they thought he was uniquely electable. This was particularly important to them because, in 2019, Britain was in the unusual position of having an opposition party that wanted to make sweeping reforms and that many in the upper echelons of society were terrified by. Once Johnson’s personal popularity seemed to vanish they had no reason to support him any more. Compounding that is that the opposition Labour Party now has probably its most right-wing leader in its history, so the rich, the media, and big business feel much less threatened by them.
Second, there really has been an outpouring of public anger, particularly from people who avoided seeing loved ones during the lockdowns. The fact that Johnson himself put the lockdown laws in place makes things much worse, because British politics always tends to be obsessed with hypocrisy (doing bad stuff = OK, doing bad stuff but telling other people to do good stuff = evil).
Third, the way him and his team reacted to the scandal was pretty incompetent. Instead of trying to play the situation down and change the subject, he kept getting indignant and categorically denying things that later turned out to be true.
Fourth, there was a series of other scandals around the same time that didn’t get quite so much attention but upset various groups of people and led to a sense that he was just lurching from one scandal to the next. In particular, there was a series of relatively low-level corruption allegations. And there was a whole thing about him appointing a guy to a senior position who was promptly the subject of numerous sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations. Johnson denied knowing anything about the allegations when he made the appointment, but then a witness came forward saying that they had heard him making offensive jokes about the allegations. And all of this was handled badly too: he kept angrily denying stuff and then sheepishly admitting that he had been mistaken.
The highest elected officials having multiple parties while at the same time telling the population who voted for them to isolate at all costs? Some people lost family members, couldn’t attend funerals, see family members of Christmas, endured months of loneliness, depression etc just for the people who made the rules to be just laughing in thier faces as they weren’t doing any of that and then once exposed for it just lied and lied about it. If he’d just openly been like “yeah we fucked up, we apologise to the British people” it wouldn’t have become such an issue but he refused to admit his wrongdoing
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