The most damaging birthday bash details for Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson is in hot water once again after ITV News reported that he had a 56th birthday party at No. 10 during the first Covid lockdown, despite the rules forbidding indoor social gatherings at the time.

Reports suggest that up to 30 people attended the event on 19 June 2020, when they sang “Happy Birthday”, ate picnic food from M&S and were served a Union Jack cake. A source told The Times that members of Johnson’s team had been emailed in advance asking them to come and “wish the prime minister happy birthday”.

ITV News also understands that family friends were hosted in the prime minister’s residence on the evening of 19 June, describing it as “an apparent further breach of the rules”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Around 30 attendees

The surprise afternoon party was allegedly organised by Johnson’s then fiancee, now wife, Carrie Symonds, and is thought to have been attended by the interior designer Lulu Lytle and the PM’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds. The senior civil servant came under fire earlier this month after a leaked email emerged in which he invited around 100 Downing Street employees to a gathering in the garden of No. 10 in May 2020.

Lytle was also at the centre of another controversy to have involved Downing Street – the April 2021 “cash for curtains” scandal – when it was reported that her “hand-crafted” £840-a-roll gold wallpaper had been used as part of the Johnsons’ lavish refurbishment of their flat.

A spokesperson for Soane Britain, Lytle’s luxury design company, said that the designer was “not invited to any birthday celebrations for the prime minister as a guest” but entered the cabinet room “briefly” as she wanted to speak to Johnson about the refurbishment work.

Sunak ‘not invited’

The list of attendees is also thought to have included No. 10’s director of communications Jack Doyle, head of operations Shelley Williams-Walker and other members of the PM’s private office. Sources told The Times that Chancellor Rishi Sunak had “not been invited”.

ITV News understands that the gathering lasted for around 20-30 minutes, but Downing Street claims that the prime minister attended for less than ten minutes and that no rules were broken. “A group of staff working in No. 10 that day gathered briefly in the cabinet room after a meeting to wish the prime minister a happy birthday,” a spokesperson said.

Barrister Adam Wagner, an expert on Covid regulations, said it was notable that No. 10 had admitted that the PM was at an “obviously illegal gathering with no real prospect of a reasonable excuse”.

Allies defend Johnson

Environment Secretary George Eustice described the allegations as getting “a little bit out of hand” in an interview with Sky News.

“I do think that in this saga there have been some serious allegations made which have been investigated,” he said, adding: “I don’t think these latest allegations fit into that category – I think they’ve gone slightly over the top.”

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries also dismissed the claims on Twitter, writing: “So, 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 ten minutes to sing happy birthday and then go back to their desks, this is now called a party?”

But Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, disagreed with Dorries’ defence. “By coincidence, my partner shares a birthday with the prime minister,” she tweeted. “We marked it in 2020 by inviting one other household to sit outside, socially distanced, in our garden. It didn't occur to us – literally couldn't conceive – that we would act outside the rules.”

News is ‘completely sickening’

Anger has been directed at the prime minister from MPs, bereaved families and members of the public who eschewed birthday celebrations in order to follow the rules. A woman whose father died from Covid shortly before Johnson’s party described the news as “completely sickening”.

“I remember June 19 vividly. It was the day before what would have been my dad’s 73rd birthday,” Jo Goodman, co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, told the Daily Mirror. “It was a horrible time for my family, but we stuck to the rules, not even being able to hug to comfort each other.”

A tweet sent by Johnson on 21 March 2020 has also resurfaced, where he praised a young girl called Josephine Booth for setting “a great example to us all by postponing her birthday party until we have sent coronavirus packing”. He also used the hashtag “#BeLikeJosephine”.

When asked about the PM’s tweet on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said that Josephine had done “exactly the right thing” by delaying her party. “I think that should have been done in all cases, and I don’t seek to say otherwise,” he added.

No. 10’s reaction marks ‘new stage’

Downing Street’s acceptance that the “gathering/event/party/whatever you want to call it” did take place marks a new stage in how the government is handling these accusations, said the BBC’s chief political correspondent Adam Fleming.

The denials “didn’t work because they weren't strictly accurate”, the acknowledgement of public anger “didn’t really get them anywhere” and the “stonewalling of ‘wait for Sue Gray’” didn’t help either, he said.

The government is now being a bit more “muscular” in how it addresses such allegations, which might suggest what their strategy is for dealing with the findings of the Sue Gray report, he concluded.