‘Bring your own booze!’: Boris Johnson in fresh Downing Street party row

More than 100 Downing Street staff were invited for drinks in the garden of No. 10 to “make the most of the lovely weather” during the May 2020 lockdown, a leaked email reveals.

The email, seen by ITV News, shows that while the rest of the country was banned from meeting more than one other person outside their household, Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary Martin Reynolds invited employees including advisors, speech writers and door staff to come over and “bring your own booze”.

The senior civil servant wrote: “After what has been an incredibly busy period we thought it would be nice to make the most of the lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the No. 10 garden this evening.”

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According to ITV’s UK editor Paul Brand, 40 staff “gathered in the garden that evening, eating picnic food and drinking”. “Crucially,” wrote Brand, “they included the prime minister and his wife Carrie Johnson.”

The BBC said that eyewitnesses had confirmed the Johnsons were there, although the broadcaster’s sources put the number of attendees at “around 30 people”.

Exploding defences

The leaked email “explodes Johnson’s defences” over previous Downing Street party allegations and leaves him “personally exposed”, said The Guardian’s chief political correspondent Jessica Elgot.

The “cheery” email invite was sent just an hour after then culture secretary Oliver Dowden said at a press conference that members of the public should only meet one person outside their household in an outdoor public area. This “disparity would seem to encapsulate better than perhaps any other alleged No 10 party – and there were many – the ‘one rule for them’ approach that has been so damaging for Boris Johnson”, wrote Elgot.

Scotland Yard announced yesterday that it was considering investigating the garden gathering, after opposition leaders backed a police probe. A spokesperson said: “The Metropolitan Police Service is aware of widespread reporting relating to alleged breaches of the Health Protection Regulations at Downing Street on May 20 2020 and is in contact with the Cabinet Office.”

The announcement came just a few weeks after The Guardian published a photograph showing the PM, his wife and 17 members of staff in the Downing Street garden on 15 May 2020. Johnson insisted that the photo did not show a party but rather “people at work, talking about work”.

But following the email leak, Labour said that “Johnson’s lies are catching up with him”. The party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has demanded that the PM comes to the Commons to face MPs over the scandal.

Johnson was “pressed repeatedly” about the 20 May event during an interview yesterday in his constituency, where he refused to deny the claims, reported The Telegraph. He said the issue was a matter of Sue Gray, who is investigating reports of lockdown parties in Whitehall.

Reynolds as Covid gatekeeper

A government source told The Telegraph that Reynolds “was supposed to be the gatekeeper on Covid awareness”, so the drinks invite “was extremely out of step”.

The email will be “key evidence” in Gray’s “sleaze inquiry”, which is “threatening to force the resignations of several senior members of Johnson’s team”, said The Sunday Times.

That the PM is alleged to have attended the event – described by one source as a “proper booze-up” – makes the matter “more serious for Johnson than other recent revelations”, added the paper.

The existence of the leaked email was first revealed last week in a blog by Johnson’s former top aide Dominic Cummings, who wrote that he was “ignored” when he said that the party “seemed to be against the rules and should not happen”.

Cummings added: “I was ill and went home to bed early that afternoon but am told this event definitely happened.”