Downing Street parties inquiry: has Sue Gray seen ‘smoking gun’ evidence?

Boris Johnson and his team face a tense wait for the publication of Sue Gray’s inquiry into alleged parties in Downing Street during lockdown.

“Everyone at the top of government is on tenterhooks,” said Toby Helm in The Observer, as the findings of the investigation threaten to have “seismic effects on many, many careers”.

Gray’s report, which is due out at some point this week, is “a moment of maximum danger for Johnson”, said Helm.

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The prime minister has so far avoided a vote of no confidence from his own MPs, but many have said they are waiting for Gray’s findings before they decide whether to join the handful of Tory MPs who have publicly called on Johnson to step down.

“Notably,” said Sebastian Payne in the Financial Times, they are holding out to see if their leader “misled parliament” about a party held in the No. 10 garden on 20 May 2020.

Johnson admitted in the House of Commons that he attended the gathering, but that nobody had told him it was not a “work event”. It was organised by his own principal private secretary Martin Reynolds, who invited Downing Street staff to the “bring your own booze” party.

Gray has already obtained an email from a senior official to Reynolds warning him the party was a bad idea, said Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times. “The concern is that Reynolds has told Gray he checked with the prime minister whether to proceed, or can point to a message he sent Johnson – a potential smoking gun,” he added.

The prime minister’s former aide Dominic Cummings “was another who told Reynolds to ditch the idea”, said Shipman. In a blog post today, Cummings revealed that he had given Gray written evidence rather than meeting her in person because he feared Johnson would “invent things” he had supposedly said to her. “I will not speak and therefore provide the PM with more chances to lie and confuse everybody,” he said.

Meanwhile, The Telegraph reported that police officers who were on duty at Downing Street at the time of the alleged gatherings have provided “detailed testimonies about what they witnessed”. One source described the statements provided to Gray as “extremely damning”, said the paper.

“The senior civil servant has also spoken to the Prime Minister, civil servants and political advisers, and accessed security pass logs and even Boris Johnson’s official diary,” it added.

The newspaper described the week as “one of the most pivotal” in Johnson’s premiership as he awaits the report’s findings.

But John Rentoul at The Independent thinks it is no longer the findings that matter, simply that the report’s publication is now seen as the “moment to trigger – or to refrain from triggering – the removal of Johnson”.

Tory MPs “will make that decision not on what they think of what happened in the garden of Downing Street 20 months ago”, he concluded, “but on who they think will best put them in an election-winning position in 20 months’ time”.