Boris Johnson has just made his leadership crisis worse at PMQs. As expected, he started the session with an apology to the public, saying ‘I know the rage they feel with me and with the government I lead’. This sounded promising, but things quickly went downhill, and that was before the questions had even started. Johnson then said ‘there are things we simply did not get right’, claiming that when he attended the party on 20 May 2020, he ‘believed implicitly that this was a work event’ and that he should have sent everyone back inside. He even made reference to the possibility that ‘it could be said to fall technically within the guidelines’ even as he accepted that the ‘work event’ was the wrong thing to have done.
His defence then deteriorated under surgical questioning from Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister was leaning heavily on two things: his apparently firm belief that a gathering in the garden to which staff had been told to bring their own drinks was a ‘work event’ and the fact that Sue Gray is still conducting her inquiry into the partying.
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