This time it's personal

 

This is written, in part, as a response to one of my trolls who asked why I seemed to be so personally incensed by Partygate. Perhaps this will explain why.

As we all know the Metropolitan Police have announced that they will after all investigate the numerous parties alleged to have taken place in Downing Street while the rest of us were in Lock down, bereaved families who had lost loved ones were unable to give them a proper farewell and people in hospital for months on end with life threatening or life changing conditions were not allowed the comforting presence of a visit from a partner or family.

On a personal level, I fall into the latter categories. Throughout the various Lock down periods, my sister Julie was going through some horrendous treatments for what turned out to a terminal condition. She had to face all of these almost entirely alone, without the reassuring presence of her husband or her closest closest family and friends. It must have been the hardest and most frightening experiences of her life. And throughout all this, we followed the Covid restrictions.

That was the reality and hardship of lock down, for my sister, her family and for many thousands of others. It was a time of fear, of grief, of extreme hardship and crushing isolation, it was far, far more than merely a tedious imposition and restriction on your right to party. Yet we all, at least most of us, tolerated lock down restrictions because we understood that it was necessary in order to protect people. 

We were constantly being told that we were all in this together, Covid was a threat to rich and to poor, it was no respecter of social position or standing, and that made the deprivations of lock down a little easier to bear. We were all suffering isolation for the greater good, in order to protect ourselves and our vulnerable friends and relatives.

So it came as a shocking slap in the teeth and the worst kind of betrayal to discover that, throughout that time, the man in charge of the UK, the man who had ultimate responsibility for depriving millions of people in England of the most fundamental liberties in order to protect the vulnerable, the chronically sick and the elderly, was himself ignoring the rules that the rest of us had to follow, often at immense personal cost.

It is now clear that throughout lock down, Johnson refused to accept that the restrictions which his government imposed on the public should in any shape or form hamper his ability to down a bottle of wine in the company of his sycophantic lackeys. His behaviour is a gross insult to those who endured lock down despite far greater hardships and deprivations than Bring Your Own Bottle Johnson ever had to face. When his supporters remarked on how tired and wiped out he looked during lock down as supposed evidence of how he was sharing our struggles. We now know that it was most likely that he was still hung over from last night’s party.

Johnson is not responsible for the terrible loss of my sister, a loss we are still struggling to comprehend, but the callous indifference and chaotic incompetence of him and his government is responsible for the fact that 150,000 families across the UK are grieving like we are grieving just now. My contempt for this entitled bag of selfish hypocrisy knows no bounds.

It is welcome news that there is now to be a police investigation into the parties in Downing Street but judging from the long and inglorious tradition of the British state failing to hold the rich and powerful to account it is highly unlikely that anything will ever come of it. Just as nothing ever came of Dominic Cummings’s lock down busting trip to Barnard Castle in order to give himself a vehicular eye test and not as a birthday outing for his wife, not at all, oh no. We have already seen, just in the past couple of years a number of instances of senior Conservatives being found by the courts to have acted unlawfully, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, and Matt Hancock have all been ruled to have acted unlawfully, and Johnson himself was ruled to have unlawfully prorogued Parliament in 2019 in order to evade parliamentary scrutiny of his Brexit deal. What all of them have in common is that every single one of them was able to break the law with impunity, not one of them suffered any negative consequences as a result of their law breaking, and the odds are very much in favour of Johnson doing exactly the same this time.

Johnson may or may not face a leadership challenge, in the absence of a clear successor and with his willingness to use blackmail and intimidation in order to bully supine Tory back benchers into line, it is by no means certain that he will be forced out of office. If he does survive a leadership challenge, the Tory party rules say that he cannot be challenged for another year. But even if the buffoon in Downing Street is forced out, he will merely be replaced by another Conservative who displays the same rank entitlement and contempt. What a prospect.

And that's why, Mr Troll, it's personal. And that's why you can take a running jump.