A long-awaited report into the partygate scandal by senior civil servant Sue Gray is unlikely to force Boris Johnson from office, Whitehall officials said on Thursday, as the police confirmed the prime minister would not be issued with further fines.
The Metropolitan Police announced the conclusion of its probe into Downing Street and Whitehall parties that broke coronavirus rules, saying 126 fines would be issued to 83 people.
Johnson became the first serving British prime minister found to have committed a criminal offence while in office after he was fined last month by the Met for attending a birthday party held for him in Downing Street in June 2020.
The Met said on Thursday that Johnson had not been issued with any additional penalties, as Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer repeated his call for the prime minister to resign.
But there was no sign of a fresh push by Conservative MPs who are critics of Johnson to try to oust him through a vote of no confidence in his leadership.
With the Met investigation complete, Gray is due to finish her inquiry into the partygate affair that was commissioned by Johnson, and her final report is expected to be published next week.
Her interim report, released in January, found there were “failures of leadership and judgment” by Number 10.
But one senior Whitehall official, referring to Gray’s final report, said “any further criticism will probably not be sufficiently damning to put the nail in the coffin [in Johnson’s ministerial career]”.
“I don’t think this will be a killer blow. Now he’s not been fined again, it would need a more powerful one than this to finish him off,” added the official.
But Gray’s final report is still expected to be highly critical of the management culture at the heart of government.
Another Whitehall official said the report was expected to pin “much of the blame [for the partygate affair] on the civil service”.
Confidence has been growing among Johnson’s allies that Gray’s final report would not prove fatal for the prime minister’s career. “As far as we’re concerned, she can publish whatever she likes,” said one ally.
One former cabinet minister said Gray, who is based in the Cabinet Office, was always unlikely to directly lay the blame on Johnson. “Cabinet Office inquiries never find the PM guilty,” he said.
The Met investigated 12 gatherings in Downing Street and Whitehall held during coronavirus restrictions in 2020 and 2021, and issued fines in relation to eight, including a “bring your own booze” event in the Number 10 garden that Johnson attended. The Operation Hillman probe cost £460,000.
The Met said “a team of 12 detectives worked through 345 documents, including emails, door logs, diary entries and witness statements, 510 photographs and CCTV images and 204 questionnaires as part of a careful and thorough inquiry”.
Starmer said “of course” Johnson should resign, adding the Met had found “industrial scale lawbreaking in Downing Street”. “That reflects a culture and the prime minister sets the culture,” he said.
The opposition leader is being investigated by Durham police over the so-called beergate scandal, and whether he broke Covid-19 rules at a Labour campaign gathering in April 2021.
The Met’s decision not to issue Johnson with further fines delivered a temporary reprieve from Conservative MPs opposed to his leadership of the Tory party.
One influential backbench Tory said a leadership challenge was “gone”, adding “people are saying ‘Thank god, let this nightmare be over’.”
One rebel Conservative said he thought Gray’s report would damage the prime minister, but added: “I am increasingly depressed. There’s a growing feeling he’ll still be here at the next election.”
After the investigations by the Met and Gray, Johnson faces one final probe by the House of Commons privileges committee into whether he knowingly misled MPs about the partygate scandal. The committee’s work is not expected to conclude until later this year.
Johnson pressed ahead on Thursday with a Whitehall restructuring to form a new office for the prime minister that he promised when Gray’s interim report was published.
The Cabinet Office will lose its economic and domestic policy secretariat to the new body, led by Number 10 permanent secretary Samantha Jones.
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