Britain\u2019s embattled Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on Tuesday facing fresh allegations in the ongoing \u201cpartygate\u201d scandal as details emerged of a surprise 56th birthday cake \u201cparty\u201d, organised for him at the peak of the first COVID lockdown in June 2020.
The scandal continues to spiral out ahead of an internal Cabinet Office inquiry report, expected this week, as Scotland Yard confirmed that the Metropolitan Police will investigate potential lockdown breaches related to alleged parties at Boris Johnson\u2019s office-residence at 10 Downing Street, as well as other government offices in London.
\u201cAs a result firstly of the information provided by the Cabinet Office inquiry team and secondly by the officers own assessment, I can confirm that the Met is now investigating a number of events that took place at Downing Street and Whitehall in the last two years,\u201d Met Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick told the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee at the Mayor of London\u2019s office. \u201cI should stress that we are now investigating does not mean fixed penalty notices will necessarily be issued in every instance and to every person involved. We will not be giving a running commentary on our current investigations but I can assure you we will give updates at significant points,\u201d she said.
Earlier, Downing Street said Johnson, who turned 56 on June 19, 2020, was present at an event \u201cfor less than 10 minutes\u201d as his staff \u201cgathered briefly\u201d to wish him a happy birthday.
The strict lockdown rules imposed at the time to contain the spread of coronavirus banned most indoor gatherings involving more than two people. But \u2018ITV News\u2019 reported on Monday night that up to 30 people attended the event, sang Happy Birthday and were served cake.
The event reportedly took place in the Cabinet Room of Downing Street just after 2 pm local time that day and had been arranged as a surprise for Johnson by his then fiancee and now wife, Carrie Symonds, after he returned from an official trip to a school in Hertfordshire.
\u201cA group of staff working in Number 10 that day gathered briefly in the Cabinet Room after a meeting to wish the Prime Minister a happy birthday. He was there for less than 10 minutes,\u201d a Number 10 Downing Street spokesperson said. The ITV report also claimed that the same evening, family friends were hosted upstairs in the Prime Minister\u2019s official residence in apparent breach of the rules.
However, Number 10 denied that claim: \u201cThis is totally untrue. In line with the rules at the time the Prime Minister hosted a small number of family members outside that evening.\u201d A number of his ministers spoke out in his defence even as the rebellion among backbench MPs continues to mount.
\u201cIt obviously was the Prime Minister\u2019s birthday, he\u2019d been given a cake earlier in the day, that\u2019s the picture in the newspapers,\u201d UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told \u2018Sky News\u2019.
The minister reiterated that it was ultimately for Sue Gray, the senior civil servant leading the Cabinet Office inquiry into all partygate allegations within government, to decide whether this was appropriate.
\u201cI think we can be pretty clear that the Prime Minister didn\u2019t present the cake to himself,\u201d he added.
UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries in a tweet said: \u201cSo, when people in an office buy a cake in the middle of the afternoon for someone else they are working in the office with and stop for 10 minutes to sing happy birthday and then go back to their desks, this is now called a party?\u201d
But Opposition Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, repeated his call for Johnson to resign in the wake of the latest revelations.
\u201cThe Prime Minister is a national distraction and he\u2019s got to go,\u201d he said.
It comes as Johnson meets his Cabinet for a regular weekly meeting on Tuesday amid the growing threat of war with President Putin in eastern Europe, against the backdrop of the partygate scandal.
Meanwhile, Sue Gray\u2019s much-anticipated report into the scandal is expected by the end of this week and, according to BBC reports, she was already aware of the June 19 birthday event.
A Conservative backbench rebellion against Boris Johnson\u2019s leadership is likely to continue intensifying until then. A total of 54 Tory MPs must write letters of no confidence in Johnson as a leader to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the party\u2019s powerful backbench 1922 Committee, to trigger a leadership contest. Most are said to be waiting for the inquiry report to make up their minds.
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Britain\u2019s embattled Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on Tuesday facing fresh allegations in the ongoing \u201cpartygate\u201d scandal as details emerged of a surprise 56th birthday cake \u201cparty\u201d, organised for him at the peak of the first COVID lockdown in June 2020.The scandal continues to spiral out ahead of an internal Cabinet Office inquiry report, expected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":247086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}