‘Let’s wait for Sue Gray’ have been the five words on every ministers’ lips this past week, at least publicly. But following Dominic Cummings’s explosive claims last night that Boris Johnson lied to parliament, the PM was forced to break his silence. On a visit to a London hospital this morning, the embattled premier was asked by Sky about what exactly happened on 20 May 2020 — the ‘BYOB’ event organised by Martin Reynolds, his principal private secretary. Johnson denied he knew anything about the event in advance and said he was not aware the shindig broke Covid rules:
Nobody told me that what we were doing was as you say, against the rules. That the event in question was something that… wasn’t a work event. I can’t believe that we would have gone ahead with an event that people were saying was against the rules… Nobody warned me that it was against the rules. I can absolutely categorically say that because I would remember that.
Those rules were, er, drawn up by Boris Johnson and his government of course. In the excruciating 16 minute long interview, Johnson also told Beth Rigby that he had apologised to the Queen, which is different to what his spokesman told journalists last week when he emphasised that it was the No. 10 operation that had apologised.
The usually unemotional PM seemed on the verge of tears when asked about the apology to the Queen after parties on eve of Prince Philip’s funeral. He told the interviewer: ‘I deeply and bitterly regret that happened. I can only renew my apologies both to Her Majesty and to the country.’ He did not rule out resigning and, when asked if he was ‘worried about losing [his] job’, Johnson deflected and tried to talk about the NHS backlog.
So, Mr S wants to know, how long until the Sue Gray report comes out?
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