I wasn’t really planning to write anything more about the vexed question of the Downing Street Christmas Party – or parties, as it now appears, of which it is easy to lose count, not just the one on December 18th. pre-arranged, but an endless round of champagne and quizzes, with the cameras conveniently covered by dustbin bags in case they were being recorded: so they knew they were doing something wrong.

But now I read that a report will be produced by Simon Case ‘as soon as we reasonably can’. We, not he. I thought that the whole point was that the Cabinet Secretary had been asked to produce an independent report. But now it is apparently a co-production, written jointly by the Prime Minister. A whitewash in other words. Well, we guessed that, but he might have had the grace not to make it quite so obvious.

I have been trying to think what I would do if I were in the Cabinet Secretary’s position of having to exonerate the Prime Minister from the idea, now widely held, that he may possibly have lied about the various parties held in Downing Street last year.

The obvious thing would be to bring in someone properly independent, not the police because they say there is no available evidence. I suggest Jo Maugham of the Good Law Project (ie someone who is independent, a lawyer and committed to legality in government). Then, I suggest he is given access to all the Prime Minister’s WhatsApp and mobile phone texts and messages which should anyway be in the public domain from 1 November to Christmas Day last year.

If there is no reference to any parties, and if there is no other record of drink having been ordered at public expense and no other communication with Lord Brownlow than the request for further funding which he had apparently forgotten when briefing Lord Geidt, then he could be cleared which would be good for him and for the government.

Providing of course that his records have not already been deleted as they were when he was Mayor.

In the unlikely event that you might want to hear my article about Bishop Auckland read aloud, you can listen to it in the third part of the podcast below. It sounds as if it’s a fairy story, but it’s true.

https://thecritic.co.uk/london-gossip-dickensian-christmasses-and-experimental-castles/

Having posted one bit of family memorabilia today, I am posting a second – a picture of my father which I was recently sent. He was aged 8, just after the first world war, staying with his grandparents in Hertfordshire:-

It was my brother’s funeral yesterday in the peaceful setting of The Charterhouse where he spent the last couple of years. I got a slight frisson from the picture of him reading as a child, which he went on doing for the rest of his life. It was taken in Pembrokeshire in August 1953, where my parents went on holiday in a small cottage the year before I was born. John was ten. I post it in his memory:

It probably does not need me to point out that the vile stench which is now emanating from 10, Downing Street – the sense of lie upon lie and party after party, encouraged, allowed and sometimes attended by the Prime Minister who arranged for crates of champagne to be delivered to his front door and managed himself to consume £12,500 of food and drink supplied by a Tory donor during lockdown (if you think about it, this is a lot of food for two people and a baby to guzzle) – is hardly going to be solved by a report by the Cabinet Secretary on a single party held on December 18th. Nice, decent and honourable as the Cabinet Secretary may be, he owes his appointment entirely to the Prime Minister through a system of personal favouritism rather than public appointment. This is surely part of the problem: that 10, Downing Street has been created as an independent fiefdom, operating outside and beyond the law, full of special advisors who are friends and former colleagues of the Prime Minister, his wife and Michael Gove. They were encouraged by Dominic Cummings to think outside the box and part of thinking outside the box was to hold parties when no one else could. So, there should be a proper and full enquiry. But this is not going to happen because it would be almost bound to find fault with the person in charge.

Well, this at least solves the conundrum. They obviously did have a party. Then, they childishly chose to deny it, laughing as they did so. The bigwigs, including the Prime Minister who was upstairs, presumably all knew perfectly well that it had happened and the Chief of Police decided to be lenient about it. It puts them all in a big hole for a monster cover-up.

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-12-07/no-10-staff-joke-in-leaked-recording-about-christmas-party-they-later-denied

There is something faintly fascinating in observing the responses to the reports of the Christmas party held on December 18th.

1. It did not happen.

This is the line pursued by the Downing Street press office, who should know.

2. If it happened, it followed the rules.

This was the Prime Minister’s version in the House of Commons, although how it could have followed the rules has not been explained.

3. If it happened, it is too long ago to investigate.

This, the least plausible version, is the one adopted by Dame Cressida Dick and the Minister of Justice, who must both know that the police are constantly required to investigate incidents which took place in the distant past. Also, it would be elementary to substantiate as the police will already hold records of who was there (if it happened).

4. It may have happened, but there are more important things to worry about.

This is the line now being peddled by MPs.

All of this would be fine, assuming that it did not happen. But it appears increasingly obvious that it did, as more details of it emerge. So, how does the government extricate itself ? I look forward to the answer.

Like lots of people, I have been pondering the fact that while we were all locked up indoors this time last year under strict government orders not to meet anyone outside a bubble, members of the Downing Street staff were themselves having a big Christmas party. The thing I find odd about this is not whether or not the Prime Minister was there or whether or not the police are in a position to investigate retrospectively, but the fact that forty or fifty civil servants and senior policy advisors thought that it was appropriate to do precisely the opposite of what everyone else had been instructed to do, not least by those people who were themselves in the room. Did they not think it might look a bit odd if and when it came to light as it was almost bound to do ? In fact, what seems particularly odd is that it did not come to light at the time and that the press decided to keep quiet about it, as well as the police standing outside the door as guests rolled out drunk into the night.

I thought that my article about what the Ruffers are doing in Bishop Auckland was not appearing till next weekend, but it seems already to be online (see below). As readers of my blog will already know, I greatly admired not just the new Gallery of Spanish Art in the town square, but the whole way that culture is being used very creatively as an instrument of civic regeneration. Perhaps most impressive of all is the building of the forthcoming Faith Museum designed by Niall McLaughlin. It is one of the best and most impressive places I have seen in 2021.

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2022/spanish-prize/