The Scotland Yard investigation into lockdown-breaching Downing Street parties has triggered speculation that Boris Johnson may face a police interview – and comparisons with the only other British prime minister to do so.
Tony Blair was the “first and hitherto last inhabitant of No. 10” to be investigated by police while in office, said The Times’ Red Box editor Patrick Maguire. Although the alleged offences against the Labour leader were “of altogether greater gravity”, the political impact on both men “may well prove eerily similar”.
Cash for honours
The scandal that “dogged” the final months of Blair’s premiership was a “much more complex inquiry” than Johnson’s so-called “partygate”, said The Telegraph.
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Police were called in to probe claims that four wealthy businessmen who made secret loans to the Labour Party were nominated by Blair for peerages. The nominations were blocked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission and the police investigation later widened to include other parties.
Blair was not arrested or interviewed under caution, but police questioned him three times as a witness. His close aide Ruth Turner was arrested, as was Labour’s chief fundraiser Michael Levy – described by The Times’ Maguire as “a pop impresario-turned-businessman whose fundraising abilities were so prodigious that he was nicknamed Blair’s cashpoint”.
In July 2007, after a 16-month inquiry, the police announced that nobody would face charges. A loophole in the law meant that loans were not required to be publicised by the Electoral Commission.
But a report by MPs on the Public Administration Committee later concluded that there was “a strong ethical case that loans should have been declared. The letter of the law may not have been broken, but the spirit of the law was quite clear.”
Blair’s fall
By the time Scotland Yard announced its decision not to press charges, Blair had already resigned. To say the inquiry was “Blair’s ultimate undoing would be reductive to the point of inaccuracy”, said Maguire in The Times, but having the police in Downing Street “doesn’t help” as a PM.
“Besieged by the Brownites, tainted by Iraq and increasingly unpopular” with voters, Blair’s departure was “a question of when, not if”. And that “question was asked repeatedly of a prime minister with the long arm of the law draped uncomfortably over his shoulder”, Maguire added.
The Blair-Boris comparison
Blair faced “a far more serious charge than that which threatens to derail Boris Johnson’s premiership”, said The Telegraph, and some senior Tories have called for a “sense of perspective”.
Indeed, there is a “strand of opinion” that it is “ridiculous to consider removing a prime minister over people having a sausage roll or a gin and tonic when they weren't meant to”, said the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg.
“Yet with the involvement of the police, a potentially bruising official inquiry and the broad public reaction reflected in the polls, there is no question that these are intensely difficult days for Downing Street,” she wrote.
Johnson could also become the first PM to be interviewed under police caution – an indignity that Blair reportedly said he would resign over during the cash for honours scandal.
The two alleged offences in the Johnson and Blair rows – “potentially breaking the lockdown laws and the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act respectively” – carry “very different penalties”, said The Guardian's diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour. But cash for honours did not have the same “public resonance as a breach of the lockdown rules, since those rules applied to everyone”.
“It is the reek of hypocrisy,” Wintour wrote, “the betrayal of an assumed sense of national shared sacrifice, that is so dangerous to Johnson.”
