Senior civil servant Sue Gray’s 37-page report on parties in Downing Street is a catalogue of lockdown rule-breaking as staff celebrated “Wine Time Fridays” and late-night gatherings led to fighting and vomiting. She found that senior officials knew they were breaking the rules, made efforts to avoid being caught and boasted about getting away with it.
Gray focused on 12 gatherings, including one in the garden of No 10 on 20 May 2020 to which Martin Reynolds, the prime minister’s principal private secretary, invited 200 members of staff, urging them to “bring your own booze”. There was a coronavirus press conference in Downing Street that day and one official emailed another warning that the noise should be kept down between 4pm and 6pm.
“Following the email, the same No 10 special adviser sent a message to Martin Reynolds by WhatsApp at 14.08 stating ‘Drinks this eve is a lovely idea so I’ve shared with the [events] team who are in the office. Just to flag that the press conference will probably be finishing around that time, so helpful if people can be mindful of that as speakers and cameras are leaving, not walking around waving bottles of wine etc’. Martin Reynolds replied ‘Will do my best!….’’, Gray writes.
At a leaving party for a Downing Street official on 18 June 2020, the karaoke machine was provided by deputy cabinet secretary Helen Macnamara, who was also head of ethics. The party lasted for a number of hours and it was, according to Gray, a raucous affair.
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“There was excessive alcohol consumption. One individual was sick. There was a minor altercation between two other individuals,” she writes.
Reynolds, who has left his post at Downing Street for the foreign office and has been tipped for an ambassadorship, was at the centre of a number of the events.
“Best of luck – a complete non-story but better than them focusing on our drinks (which we seem to have got away with),” he writes to another official in one of the messages reproduced in Gray’s report.
Gray appears to accept Boris Johnson’s version of events regarding those gatherings at which he was present, including the birthday celebration for which he was fined by the Metropolitan Police. When he attended leaving parties for officials, he made a speech, stayed for a little while and left.
She is damning about the culture within Downing Street that allowed the parties to happen, particularly the treatment of junior officials and other staff in the building.
“I found that some staff had witnessed or been subjected to behaviours at work which they had felt concerned about but at times felt unable to raise properly. I was made aware of multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff. This was unacceptable,” she writes.
83 individuals, including the prime minister, his wife and chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak, have been fined for breaching coronavirus regulations in Downing Street and Gray’s central conclusion is that many of those who were making the rules were regularly breaking them.
“Whatever the initial intent, what took place at many of these gatherings and the way in which they developed was not in line with Covid guidance at the time. Even allowing for the extraordinary pressures officials and advisers were under, the factual findings of this report illustrate some attitudes and behaviours inconsistent with that guidance,” she writes.
