When I voted to make Boris leader of my party it was to win an election and ‘get Brexit done’; in that respect he has delivered. When I made my decision to support him I did so in the full knowledge that he came with a cupboard full of skeletons. Life and politics are about choices and priorities.
When ‘partygate’ first broke, I responded to emails by observing that those who ‘have broken the law deserve to face the full force of the law’. Well, if the full force of the law is £100 fine, then so be it.
It is true that we require MPs to quit when guilty of serious crimes for which imprisonment is the penalty, but not for a fixed penalty notice. In the end, it comes down to how seriously you consider the PM’s breach to be.
I am not persuaded that my expectations should be altered by the fact that the rules that the PM breached, were his very own rules. Though, more fool him for having made them.
I opposed those rules. I thought the Government had no place to make them. By the month, as more evidence emerges of the damage that those ruled have done, I am reassured that my stance was the right one.
I spent the first few weeks of lockdown explaining the distinction between guidance and regulation to constituents in order to reassure them that they were entitled to do things that they often thought they were forbidden to do. This was particularly the case for many sole traders who feared that they were no longer entitled to carry on their businesses. There was a clear distinction between a dwelling and a workplace.
In this column on 12th February Another party…and a riot ? (desmondswaynemp.com) I acknowledged that when the PM told the Commons rules were not broken and that there were no parties at number 10, a shudder went down my spine. As I said then, not because I didn’t believe him to be telling the truth, I did believe him and still do, but because I had no doubt that his honest belief of what amounted to a ‘work event’ would be considered to be a party by a great many people. Now the Police have reached that judgement too.
I wasn’t there. I haven’t seen the evidence, but I have my doubts.
(What was clearly a party, and a disgraceful and egregious breach if the accounts are true, was the gathering on the eve of Prince Phillip’s funeral, but on that occasion the PM was in Buckinghamshire.)
The deaths of so many people from Covid-19 were made so much worse by the inhumanity of regulations that prevented friends and relatives comforting the dying and comforting one another at funerals and wakes. My heart goes out to those who have written to me to express their anguish and anger about the way their loved ones died. That anger is justified by the want of judgement at No.10. I accept that, as has the Prime Minister.
My focus remains the much greater folly of what I still consider the disproportionate regulations themselves. I am entitled to blame the PM for them, but I must acknowledge that his Government’s efforts first to relax and then to revoke the regulations, were opposed by the opposition parties now demanding the PM’s head, but they wanted even stricter and prolonged restrictions.