For those blissfully unaware of the roots of the daily melodrama into which UK politics has descended in recent weeks, the whole sorry scenario revolves around a series of drinks parties which took place in Downing Street, government ministries and the Conservative Party’s central office between May 2020 and April 2021 (and possibly before and since) during periods of national Covid-19 restrictions which included social distancing requirements, bans on social gatherings and full lockdowns.

Even while he was instructing the population to avoid social mixing, it appears that the Prime Minister himself was permitting, and even attending, various gatherings at his own London residence. In the last month, reports have emerged that, while ordinary British people were prevented by his government’s regulations from visiting their own sick and dying relatives, the premier himself seemed to be defying those same rules in a fashion that was both reckless and brazen. His own most senior adviser at the time has claimed that he warned Boris Johnson that such gatherings were unlawful, but that his words of warning were ignored. The Prime Minister has responded that he had no memory of such a conversation, but that he felt sure that, if it had happened, he would have remembered it.

Mr. Johnson initially denied that any such parties had taken place. He then denied that those parties had broken any rules. He went on to deny being aware of any such parties at the time. He further denied attending any such parties. He finally admitted to having attended at least one such party but claimed not to have realised at the time that such parties breached his own government’s Covid restrictions. He declared that he had believed that a gathering in his garden at which thirty people had been socializing and drinking wine (and at which he admitted he had spent 25 minutes chatting to colleagues) was not in fact a party at all, but was a legitimate work event. Earlier, he had said something similar about a smaller gathering in his garden which he and his wife had both attended and where again, alongside a selection of fine cheeses, there had been provided for the enjoyment of his hard-working staff several decent bottles of wine. ‘Those,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘were meetings with people at work, talking about work.’ It is unclear how much alcohol consumption Boris Johnson considers appropriate for the workplace; but the drinking habits of his core team could explain some of the more outlandish policy decisions of his time in office.

Similar parties had been hosted by the head of his Covid-19 taskforce, by his administration’s Departments of Education and Transport, by a former Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty, and by the chief civil servant who had originally been appointed to head the inquiry into all these parties. The Prime Minister’s press secretary and the Leader of the House of Commons were both filmed joking about the subject. Downing Street staff had even held parties on the eve of the funeral of the Queen of England’s husband. Indeed, it has been reported that it was a regular occurrence for staff from the Prime Minister’s office to be dispatched to a local supermarket to fill a suitcase with bottles of wine.

Boris Johnson’s personal conduct has always been erratic, even at the best of times. It is, for example, unknown how many children he has fathered. Question marks still hang over the funding of costly refurbishments made to his Downing Street apartment, and over certain acts of patronage during his stint as Mayor of London. His history of racist and Islamophobic remarks is also commonly known. He is renowned for the bullish but empty bombast which characterizes most of his public pronouncements. When in November he regaled a meeting of business leaders with a series of off-the-cuff observations on the topic of the popular children’s cartoon character Peppa Pig, many commentators felt that this wayward behaviour was pretty much par for the course.

His professional performance has been similarly questionable. His mishandling of the early stages of the pandemic, and the damage caused by his hesitant response to the arrival of the Delta variant a year ago, have been well documented: from his tendency to become enmired in indecision, through to his administration’s dubious practices in the awarding of crucial public contracts. Indeed, on 24 January 2022, one treasury minister resigned, citing the government’s ‘lamentable track record’ in preventing widespread fraudulent practices in its scheme for loans offered as financial relief to businesses during the Covid crisis.

Johnson’s record on Brexit has not been much better, gaining him a reputation for his willingness to break promises and to breach international law, in such areas as the negotiation of fishing rights and measures to ensure the maintenance of a porous land border on the island of Ireland. Meanwhile, his failure to achieve any significant impacts in his hosting of the global climate change conference in Glasgow last year may come to be viewed by future historians as a wasted opportunity to reverse an ongoing environmental catastrophe which threatens to devastate human civilization and the prospects for the survival of life on this planet.

It therefore seems reasonable to suppose that the scandal that we have come to call ‘Party-gate’ may prove to have been something of a tipping point not only in his political fortunes, but more specifically in his supporters’ perceptions of his abilities and his moral integrity, exposing to open scrutiny swathes of disaffection with his leadership which have for some while been growing within his own party. This wave of political discontent led to his forced show of conditional contrition at his appearance before parliament on 12 January, and to the dramatic events that unfolded when he returned to the House of Commons a week later. 

On that latter occasion, one of his backbenchers crossed the floor of the House, quitting his Conservative allegiance to join Her Majesty’s Opposition, taking a seat directly behind the Labour leader. Furthermore, despite Mr. Johnson’s opportunistic attempt to resume his characteristic bravado with the crowd-pleasing announcement that he would revoke all Covid-19 restrictions the following week (apparently unaware that the daily death toll continued to number in the hundreds), one of his former allies, the senior Conservative (and one-time Cabinet minister) David Davis, called directly for his resignation: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.’ The following day, another former Tory Cabinet minister told the BBC that the public were ‘rightly furious’ and that the situation now looked ‘like checkmate’ for the Prime Minister.

Mr. Johnson resisted calls for his immediate resignation by arguing that his critics should await the findings of the inquiry into these parties chaired by a woman called Sue Gray, Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, and apparently one of the few senior civil servants they were able to find who had not been accused of breaking any of the Covid rules. He also responded to demands for his departure from members of his own party by prompting his ministers to engage in acts of what one of his more vocal Tory critics described as ‘blackmail’ and ‘pressure and intimidation’. In his typically evasive style, the Prime Minister responded to these allegations of bullying that he had ‘seen no evidence’ of such activities. On 21 January, The Times newspaper reported that his detractors specifically claimed that they had been threatened with the withdrawal of funding from their constituencies and had been smeared with ‘unsubstantiated claims about their drinking habits and personal lives’.

On 22 January, following Downing Street’s announcement that it would not investigate those allegations, it emerged that one of the MPs campaigning for the removal of Mr. Johnson had arranged to speak to the police in relation to his claims that he and others were being blackmailed in a bid to force the withdrawal of their demands for a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister. It takes 54 such requests to trigger the committee of backbench Tory MPs to convene such a vote. The Prime Minister is evidently desperate to ensure that this critical mass is not reached.

The leader of the Liberal Democrats suggested that Johnson was acting ‘more like a mafia boss than a prime minister’. This would appear to be consistent with persistent rumours of his notoriously vengeful and vindictive leadership style, and more generally with his extraordinary capacity for childishness. Like his transatlantic soulmate – and fellow philandering narcissist – Donald Trump, he has always been able to combine disarming charm with pettiness, impetuosity, and lazy ignorance, in his overblown performances of brash political machismo.

Like President Trump, Boris Johnson has also made it clear that he will not leave office without the most godawfully undignified and protracted fight. And, like Trump, Johnson fights dirty. As dirty as he parties. He doesn’t appear to care at all who gets hurt.

In a further extraordinary development, it was reported on 23 January that a former junior minister had alleged that she had been fired from the government in 2020 on the explicit grounds that she was a Muslim woman. The emergence of stories of such apparent insanity might be considered symptomatic of the dying days of a capricious and irrational administration which has survived as long as it has only by commanding loyalty and silencing its critics with its oppressive threats, but which has suddenly lost its aura of authority and is now falling apart. The following day, the Prime Minister ordered the Cabinet Office to investigate the MP’s claims.

But what matters is not merely whether such an accusation proves to be true. What also matters is that it seems eminently believable that such an offence might be committed by an administration led by a man who once outrageously referred to African people as ‘piccaninnies with watermelon smiles’ and disparagingly compared women wearing burkas to letter boxes. What matters is that it reminds his party of such comments; and it makes them question again why they ever put him into power in the first place.

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The same day as those accusations of Islamophobia emerged, on the other side of the world, and in stark contrast to Boris Johnson’s flouting of his own government’s rules, the Prime Minister of New Zealand announced she was postponing her own wedding in line with her nation’s Covid restrictions. Jacinda Ardern would appear to be positioned not only on the opposite side of the planet from Mr. Johnson but also on the opposite end of the scale of political integrity.

The following day, the country was stunned by the further revelation that in June 2020, at the height of national lockdown, up to thirty people had attended a birthday party for Mr. Johnson inside Downing Street, where cake was served, and ‘Happy Birthday’ was sung to the birthday boy. If ever any evidence was needed to cement the public perception of the Prime Minister as a spoilt child, then this was it.

The next day, London’s Metropolitan Police announced that they had at last launched an investigation into ‘potential breaches of Covid-19 regulations’ in Downing Street and across government. One of Boris Johnson’s allies quickly provoked a great deal of unwanted mirth when he attempted to defend his boss by suggesting that the birthday party had not been his fault at all, as he had been ‘ambushed with a cake’. A senior BBC journalist took to social media to point out that there was, as yet, no formal confirmation that the police had ‘interviewed the cake which ambushed the Prime Minister’.

The publication of the eagerly awaited findings of the internal government investigation into the ‘Party-gate’ scandal had been expected on Wednesday 26 January. Journalists and politicians had hung impatiently around the corridors of Westminster awaiting their first sight of Sue Gray’s report. But, that day at least, the highly anticipated document stubbornly failed to materialize. It was widely rumored that Downing Street had been able to delay the release of the report on the grounds that any passages which might impinge upon the ongoing police investigation should first be redacted. It was also supposed that the document would have to undergo detailed legal scrutiny before it could be made public.

The report’s findings were then generally expected to be published some twenty-four hours later, on the day that England’s Covid rules were eased. Cynics guessed that the timing of this was not perhaps entirely coincidental. The decision to lift restrictions certainly seemed to have been rooted in political exigency rather than scientific argument. The previous day had, after all, registered reports of more than 100,000 new Covid cases (despite an ongoing shortage of home testing kits) and 346 new deaths. The removal of regulations was nevertheless calculated to afford Boris Johnson an immediate boost in popularity among his core supporters. It was, as they say, a good day to bury bad news.

The day before, the Prime Minister had done his best to deploy such senseless optimism when he had faced parliament for his traditional weekly session of questions, answers and insults. The House of Commons was, as expected, more than usually fractious. That meant it was very fractious indeed. The Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition asked the Prime Minister whether he would resign if it were proven that he had lied to parliament, but his polite enquiry went unanswered. He went on to accuse Mr. Johnson of demonstrating ‘nothing but contempt for the decency, honesty and respect’ of the British people. One Labour MP was obliged to retract his impassioned suggestion that Boris Johnson was a liar. Another Labour member declared that the government’s approach was characterized by ‘threats and intimidation, bribery and blackmail, racism and Islamophobia’. Mr. Johnson later rejected a call from yet another Labour MP that he ‘do the decent thing’ and resign. As the Speaker of the House had observed, tensions were certainly ‘running high’.

Less than an hour after he had appeared in parliament, evidence emerged which suggested that Mr. Johnson, contrary to his previous denials, had been involved in a decision to prioritize the evacuation of animals on flights from Kabul during the hasty NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan: ‘the PM has just authorized […] animals to be evacuated,’ read the August 2021 email from a British government official. This revelation might have seemed trivial in itself; but it provided even further ammunition for those taking potshots at Boris Johnson’s battered reputation. That day, one polling organization also revealed that 60 per cent of people polled wanted a vote of no confidence in Mr. Johnson’s leadership.

On 27 January, the Prime Minister promised that Sue Gray’s report would be published in full, whenever it was published, but said that he did not know when that would be. And so, yet another day passed and the elusive document once more failed to appear. The growing frustration was evident in the tired and desperate eyes of the news reporters. Their deadlines came and went, and there was still no story to tell. The suspense was palpable. Yet, despite the soaring adrenaline of the news junkies, the heightened public interest was in danger of reaching its peak and flipping back into wearied indifference. The British people were becoming increasingly sick of all this. The excitement was starting to turn stale.

By that point, it seemed difficult to imagine how much less tenable the Prime Minister’s position could become. The optics could barely get any worse – short of visions of the nation’s leader being led away from his office by heavily armed police, in handcuffs and a straitjacket, his necktie askew and his trousers around his ankles, kicking like a lassoed kangaroo and screaming obscenities about ethnic minorities, cartoon pigs and the royal family, while spitting virally loaded phlegm at passers-by, and making crudely carnal gestures at any woman in sight.

The actual situation might not have been quite that bad – not foam-at-the-mouth crazy – but it was still pretty terrible. There have nevertheless been many in the parliamentary Conservative party who have not been ready to remove Mr. Johnson quite yet. This is not the result of any kind of misplaced loyalty or sentiment, but is a matter of cool pragmatism, of realpolitik. They simply do not feel it would be the right time to install a new leader. The next general election is still nearly three years away, and the party would at that point wish to take advantage of the boost in popularity likely to be enjoyed by Johnson’s successor during their honeymoon period in office, before the British public tire of whichever new incumbent the party chooses to place in Downing Street. In other words, they would like someone new and fresh in post at election time. Given their current poor performance in the opinion polls, they would also hardly be keen to call an early election in the next month or so. 

Furthermore, there is no clear candidate to replace the Prime Minister. Of the two figures seen as the frontrunners, one, Liz Truss, is popular with the party, while the other, Rishi Sunak, is popular with the country. Tory grandees would therefore like to have the opportunity over the next few months to see if they might either convince the British electorate to develop some respect for the irritatingly ebullient Ms. Truss, or persuade their less enlightened party members to overcome their ingrained racial and intellectual prejudices and come to accept the disconcertingly articulate Mr. Sunak.

The initial findings of Sue Gray’s investigation were released on the last day of January. These findings were (as expected) at this stage short on detail. Ms. Gray remarked that it was not possible ‘to provide a meaningful report setting out and analyzing the extensive factual information’ which the police had asked to be held back. However, they were, although couched in the balanced language of the British civil service, perhaps surprisingly explicit in their tone. This interim report noted ‘serious failure to observe not just the high standards expected of those working at the heart of government but also of the standards expected of the entire British population at the time’. It added that patterns of workplace behavior surrounding these gatherings were ‘difficult to justify’. It further observed that ‘some staff wanted to raise concerns about behaviors they witnessed at work but at times felt unable to do so’ within a culture that diverged from what was professionally appropriate, and which was underpinned by fragmented and blurred lines of leadership. The investigation had focused on sixteen social gatherings, including one which took place in Boris Johnson’s own flat, and which he appeared previously to have denied.

On the day of the report’s publication, Mr. Johnson addressed parliament: ‘I want to say sorry. I’m sorry for the things we simply didn’t get right. And I’m sorry for the way this matter has been handled.’ His sense of responsibility appeared to be collective rather than personal. He went on to say that his team would make changes to how Downing Street was run – so that he would be able to get on the job that he was elected to do. He declared that he would ‘fix’ the problem and asserted that his government could be ‘trusted to deliver’ on its promises. As usual, there was little sense that he accepted a great deal of personal blame, nor any suggestion that he was planning to go anywhere anytime soon. Behind the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was the only member of his front bench who wore a mask, as if he were embarrassed to be seen there. When the Leader of the Opposition called for his departure, Mr. Johnson accused him of ‘political opportunism’, apparently unaware of the extraordinary irony of this. The former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May asked her successor whether he had failed to read his government’s rules or whether he had failed to understand them – or whether he simply didn’t believe they applied to him. One of his backbenchers declared that Boris Johnson could no longer enjoy his support. In a particularly dramatic turn of events, the Leader of the Scottish Nationalists was ejected from the chamber when he refused to withdraw his claim that the Prime Minister had lied to the House of Commons.

Sue Gray’s report itself had never been expected to be conclusive in the exoneration or indictment of the Prime Minister. That will be the province of the party, the police and the press. The media response may however depend, in part, upon how Downing Street responds to various apparently unrelated issues. The country’s most powerful paper, the Daily Mail, has already succeeded in its campaigns to eke an apology out of Mr. Johnson and to press him into an early reversal of his coronavirus measures. Last week, it also started pushing for a delay to a tax increase due to be implemented in April. It will be interesting to see what further pledges and compromises his fickle allies may attempt to squeeze out of the wounded and weakened premier in exchange for their support for his ongoing bid to secure his political survival.

However, strangely, Johnson’s immediate fate may have little to do with the intrigues and machinations currently churning within his own party or more broadly in the domestic political arena. He may end up being saved, or at least reprieved, by events on the far side of the continent. The unfolding situation in Ukraine may offer him at least a brief stay of execution. Nobody relishes a change of leadership in the middle of an international crisis. And nobody in their right mind wants the country’s Deputy Prime Minister (formerly, an unprecedentedly inept Foreign Secretary) taking over on an interim basis, as a perilously careless national caretaker, at this especially difficult time. Mr. Johnson has therefore, of course, been keen to ramp up the rhetoric when he has spoken ominously of the danger of the Eastern European situation turning into a ‘painful, bloody and violent business’. Following those remarks, the right-wing Mail and Express newspapers both quoted senior Tory figures arguing that those circumstances overseas were much more important and more deserving of Boris Johnson’s attention than some trifling concerns about boozy parties at the heart of Whitehall.

Meanwhile, however, the British Conservative Party’s internecine struggles still rumbles on, in the unedifying spectacle of the apparently intractable force of an implacable public, press and parliament pitched (with possible police support) against the immoveable object of a tenacious tenant of Downing Street who has obstinately refused to budge. As a former leader of the Liberal Democrats put it, his strategy has appeared to be to carry on blustering incoherently for just a little bit longer than people can remain angry at him. Surely, he seemed to be thinking, surely something’s got to give. It was as if he was awaiting that moment when a naughty child gets away with their naughtiness because the adults in the room cannot help laughing at whatever absurd misdemeanours have been committed by the exasperating brat.

The painfully slow and incremental process of this Prime Minister’s defenestration is hugely embarrassing and damaging for his own party and for the country, as he clings on doggedly, with straining fingers and broken, bleeding nails grasping the eighteenth-century lintel, at the threshold to his official residence, and, like a stroppy toddler, he defies every effort to make him loosen his grip on his cherished toy. But, though he is clearly living on borrowed time, it may be the only way that his political peers will ever manage to get him to let it go.