Whatever happens after Gray report, Partygate shows journalism matters

Opinion

Even if Boris Johnson survives a damning report by Sue Gray, remember that without robust journalism no-one would ever have known about the Partygate scandal.

The main performance is of course the Sue Gray report and all its manifestations in the House of Commons and in televised press conferences where Prime Minister Boris Johnson will try to apologise his way out of trouble as he has done so many times before.

But the warm up acts, mainly from television journalists have been pretty spectacular too.

Step forward, yet again, ITV’s Paul Brand, who got his hands on photos with Johnson glass in hand at a leaving party in Downing Street, one of those parties that never happened during the lockdown.

The importance of Brand’s scoop went far beyond the photos themselves, although they looked particularly damning, because at the time only two people could meet indoors at anything resembling a social gathering.

The story that keeps on giving is even more important because Johnson had already been asked in the Commons whether there had been a party on the day in question and said their had not.

It is difficult to envisage a clearer example of deliberately misleading the House, behaviour that in olden times would lead to the automatic resignation of a Prime Minister.

Questions have also been raised about the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police and why some of those who attended the non-existent leaving party received fixed penalty notices while the Prime Minister did not.

Kuenssberg liberated

Paul Brand and ITV have been a thorn in the side of Johnson who has dug out most of the telling Partygate revelations, with the help of Pippa Crerar of the Daily Mirror.

It has got so bad that one media industry wag suggested Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries should be called in immediately to privatise ITV.

The attack has also been joined by Laura Kuenssberg, newly liberated from the daily grind of recording implausible Downing Street denials as the BBC’s political editor.

Her Panorama Partygate special contains yet more explosive revelations about the culture within Johnson’s Downing Street.

Kuenssberg has got pure gold from the inside in the form of three interviews, albeit on understandable conditions of anonymity, with those who saw the parties that never were and anyway didn’t break any rules, and their aftermath.

Not only was there a press office party every Friday which started at 4pm but bins were overflowing with empty bottles the next morning and that throughout not only did Johnson know about such parties but often popped in for a drink himself.

It looks as if Laura Kuenssberg and her Panorama team may have done a more thorough job of investigating the heart of the rule-breaking in Number 10 than the police with their rather absurd questionnaires.

Naturally most of the national newspapers put the Brand pictures and the renewed allegation that the Prime Minister had wilfully misled the Commons on their front pages – but not all.

In the face of one of the most sensational political stories for weeks that could be a part of an equally sensational outcome, The Sun preferred pictures of a football pitch invasion at Brighton. Err three off-duty cops had been spotted in the crowd.

The Partygate pictures were safely tucked away on page eight.

The Daily Mail preferred the likely serious impact of a railway strike that may or may not happen.

The paper’s main take on Partygate, on page 5 was to suggest that the culprit for the leak was Dominic Cummings together with the idea that as Johnson was in his suit and had his red box by his side he was obviously at work, and besides it wasn’t a party.

The Mail has prepared for the Sue Gray report in its own special way.

Last Friday’s splash was an attack on the police investigation of Partygate which cost £460,000 as a “farcical” waste of time and money, although it must have spent quite a lot of time and money to investigate Keir Starmer’s beer and curry at Durham Miner’s Hall.

Then it was time for the Mail to discredit Sue Gray by lapping up the views of “Boris Johnson’s allies” accusing the top civil servant of “playing politics,” and being responsible for “toxic briefings” by her team.

The Mail was certain that it was Gray herself who has requested a “secret” meeting with the Prime Minister.

Robust journalism

Unfortunately, Johnson’s allies seem to have not been particularly well-informed about what actually happened or just might have been spreading deliberately misleading information to the gullible Daily Mail.

In fact, as a detailed story in The Times set out, the meeting was called by Samantha Jones, Johnson’s Downing Street permanent secretary.

It happened after the Prime Minister was said to be “apoplectic” about a story in The Times saying that Gray’s findings were so damaging that Johnson might have little alternative but to resign.

The Times went further. Much further. The paper reported that two Whitehall sources claimed that Johnson had suggested that perhaps, following the police investigation, it might not be necessary to publish her report after all.

This would have been a tricky manoeuvre to pull off even by Johnsonian standards given the number of times he has promised to publish the report in full – not least on the floor of the House of Commons and the idea was quietly dropped.

By all accounts Sue Gray, who once ran a pub in Newry, Co. Down with her Northern Irish husband, doesn’t frighten easy and will not mince her words. It is her moment in the limelight, and possibly in history.

Many Conservative MPs have said they were suspending judgement on Boris Johnson until they had read the Gray report and it is difficult to predict which way they will now jump.

The likelihood is that they will buy, at least for now, the “apologise and move on to more important things” strategy and that will be supported by the ministers dispatched to toe the line in the broadcasting studios of the land and in the ranks of the right-wing newspapers.

It is much less likely that the overwhelming majority of those who obeyed the Covid lockdown rules, often at great personal cost, will be equally forgiving of Downing Street bins overflowing with empty booze bottles.

Then the circus will move on to 23 June for two by-elections at different ends of England, in Wakefield where the former Conservative MP Imran Khan has been jailed for sexually assaulting a teenager, and in Tiverton and Honiton where Conservative MP Neil Parish resigned after admitting watching porn in the Commons Chamber.

The say of the electorate could be decisive, but whatever happens never forget that without robust journalism no-one would ever have known about Boris Johnson’s Partygate scandal.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays.

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