Her report implicates her own Cabinet Office

Ian Fantom – May 27, 2022

1. Contents:

• When Boris met Sue
• Report lacking in detail
• Cabinet Office implicated
• Sir Humphrey and the grey cardinal
• Poor deluded voters

Before the publication of Sue Gray’s report on Partygate, there had been much talk about a meeting the Prime Minister is said to have held with Sue Gray shortly beforehand. The media focused on the possibility that he was trying to get Sue Gray to modify her report, or even not to publish it. I should have thought that the time for any such initiative would have long passed, and that Boris Johnson would have known the risks in such a meeting being leaked to the press. That would suggest some more urgent, and so recent, development in the Partygate affair.

2.     When Boris met Sue

Around that three new photos of Boris at one of the parties was published by ITV News. I first heard about that on Channel 4 News, and noticed the lack of any mention about the source of photo they showed. The talk in the media was constantly about whether Boris should resign as Prime Minister. The police, too, came under criticism, as people wanted to know why the police had issued a fixed penalty notice to another participant at the same party, but not to the Prime Minister.

There was also talk of the photo being leaked. That would imply that it had come from some official source, rather than some individual just finding it on his phone at the last moment. The bodies that would have been most likely to possess that photo would clearly have been the police, who had issued fixed penalty notices, and Sue Gray’s investigative team regarding Partygate. It seems less likely that the police would have leaked the photo, since it raised questions over the police investigation. So could that photo have been leaked by Sue Gray or one of her team?

The effect of that ‘leak’ was to set off a plethora of press publicity over whether Boris should go, as if to prepare the ground for the publication of Sue Gray’s report, which again enhanced the furore over whether Boris should go.

This whole affair is beginning to sound like a witch-hunt. If Boris was telling lies to Parliament, then he won’t be the only one telling lies, because plenty of his mates were backing him up. So a resignation of the leader is not going to remove the problem. Quite clearly, anyone attending any of those parties cannot believe the narrative that the government, together with its hand-picked advisors, have been presenting to us week after week. Perhaps they were aware of the government’s statement of 19 March 2020, stating, “As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK”. The only talk is of them breaking the rules they themselves have imposed on the rest of the population, yet if they believed in the mortal risks of partying during Lockdown, then simply they would not have done it. So how many of those presenting or supporting that narrative were involved? Naming names is important in resolving that issue.

Lying to parliament, like hypocrasy, is part of the British Constitution. As I pointed out in my article ‘The Confusion of Powers’, the Supreme Court has stated: “Although the United Kingdom does not have a single document entitled ‘The Constitution’, it nevertheless possesses a Constitution, established over the course of our history by common law, statutes, conventions and practice”. No-one could reasonably argue that lying has not been one of the practices in Parliament for a very long time. Tony Blair lied to Parliament in order to get the UK into a war, so why shouldn’t Boris Johnson lie to Parliament for no other reason than to save his own skin? The real issue here, surely, is that the whole lot of them must have been lying to the public about covid being a highly contageous and life-threatening disease, when clearly they didn’t believe it themselves.

I should have thought it would have been clear to most people that Boris isn’t himself taking major decisions in the Cabinet. He gives the impression of being a mere public relations spokesman for whoever is in charge, and that everything else that happens in the Cabinet follows from that. So are the Powers That Be now trying to get rid of Boris, having empowered him in the first place? Perhaps he has been too persistent in making Brexit happen. Whatever the reason, I have to wonder whether the leaking of that photo had anything to do with Boris’s meeting with Sue Gray shortly before her report was due to be published. If that photo was leaked in order to set off the clamour for Boris to resign, then he would have had every reason to discuss that with suspect number one, and possibly even to confront her.

3.     Report lacking in detail

Sue Gray’s report, which was published on Wednesday, 25 May, 2022, is remarkably lacking in detail.

For a start, she only publishes nine photos from the masses of evidence she must have acquired. The recently ‘leaked’ photo is not amongst them. They all show Boris Johnson and little else. Except for

Rishi Sunak and one other, all the rest are blurred out, so that we can’t see the full context. Two photos look as if they could actually be working – not at their desks, but looking at a screen, which is illegible in the photo. There is no mention of who took those photos. Were they taken with the knowledge of others present, or were they taken surrupticiously?

Similarly, the report avoids mentioning names of most of the people involved, reserving that honour for the leadership. Out of 83 people who were fined by the police for attending those parties, we have very few names. Here are the named individuals, referred to in the report either by name or by their position – the inferred information from outside the report is given in italics:

• Matt Hancock (Secretary of State for Health and Social Care)
  • Convened with others in the No10 Garden following a press conference, with wine, discussing the press conference.
• Gavin Williamson (Secretary of State for Education)
  • Attended a gathering in the Department for Education to thank staff for their hard work ahead of the Christmas break (10 December 2020). There was food and alcohol available and it lasted for around an hour.
• Boris Johnson (Prime Minister)
  • Attended 8 events, but only briefly. The majority of mentions of him relate to his role as PM. One mention stated that he had received a Fixed Penalty Notice from the police.
• Carrie Johnson (Mrs. Johnson, Prime Minister’s wife)
  • Attended Boris Johnson’s Birthday party in the Cabinet Room, and an event in Downing Street Garden
• Martin Reynolds (PM’s Principal Private Secretary)
  • Not only attended one event, with an implication that he attended a second event, but sent out emails to let people know about them. These events were ‘socially distanced drinks’ in the garden of No 10, and the PM’s birthday party.
• Dominic Cummings (PM’s senior adviser)
  • Attended garden drinks (2020-05-15) but raised concerns about a subsequent garden party (2020-05-20). He attended a leaving event for No 10 official (1) with speeches and drinks in the Cabinet Office (2020-06-18), but it’s not clear to me whether or not that would be classified as a works event; the party followed in the garden, but there was no suggestion that Dominic Cummings attended that.
• Lee Cain  (No 10 Director of Communications 2019–2020)
  • Advised against holding a garden party (2020-05-20), having warned that it would be “somewhat of a comms risk in the current environment”. He did attend briefly to ascertain numbers. Also warned against holding a subsequent event, saying “But it obviously comes with rather substantial comms risks”. It is not stated whether Lee Cain attended his own leaving party in the No 10 flat (2020-11-13).
• Simon Case (Permanent Secretary for Covid and the Pandemic Response in No 10)
  • He attended a leaving event for No 10 official (1) with speeches and drinks in the Cabinet Office (2020-06-18), but it’s not clear to me whether or not that would be classified as a works event; a party followed in the garden, but there was no suggestion that Dominic Cummings attended that. Attended the PM’s birthday party for a short while. I see no reference to the party he is said to have held in his own office, which led to him recusing himself when he was in charge of investigating Partygate, before the responsibility was handed over to Sue Gray.
• Stuart Glassborow (Deputy Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister)
  • Gave a speech at the ‘No 10 official (1)’ leaving party (18 June 2020) and attended the subsequent party.  Sent out an invitation to a leaving party (14 January 2021).
• Helen MacNamara (Deputy Cabinet Secretary)
  • Attended the second part of the leaving event for No 10 official (1)  (2020-06-18)
• Sir Mark Sedwill (Cabinet Secretary)
  • He stayed for a short time at the leaving event for No 10 official (1)  (2020-06-18), second part, and before leaving for another meeting he gave permission for the use of his office for a short time.
• Cleo Watson (a No 10 special adviser)
  • Organised the Prime Minister’s Birthday Party
• Kate Josephs, (a Director General in the Covid Task force)
  • Invited people to a leaving party for herself and ‘a No 10 official’. She attended and stayed late.
• James Bowler (Second Permanent Secretary)
  • Advised that a leaving event (17 December 2020) for Kate Josephs and a No 10 official could take place on the basis that it was time limited, that no one was to travel into the office specially and that it should be socially distanced. He attended, giving a leaving speech, then left. The partying continued.
• Simon Ridley (one of the other Director Generals of the Covid 19 Taskforce)
  • Attended the leaving event (17 December 2020) for Kate Josephs and ‘a No 10 official’, but not the subsequent party.
• Jack Doyle (a senior special adviser; later: Director of Communications  2021–2022)
  • Took part in the entertainment at a Wine & Cheese Evening (Friday 18 December 2020), combined with a regular event for the Press Office.
• James Slack (Director of Communications, 2021)
  • Attended his own leaving event and subsequent party in the garden (16 April 2021). It is not clear whether he attended a separate leaving event for a No 10 official on the same day, though there was considerable overlap in those attending.

Only three of these are politicians, but their names were not mentioned explicitly. Even Rishi Sunak was missing in the report, even though he is clearly identifiable in one of the photos included. Except for the Prime Minister’s wife, all the rest are advisors or civil servants: 13 of them. There were some unnamed individuals, too. Special advisers were referred to as “No 10 and DHSC officials and special advisers”, “a special adviser”, “special advisers in No 10”, “A No 10 special adviser”, “Five special advisers”, “a No 10 special advisor”, “A No 10 Director”, “No 10 Private Secretaries”, “members of his [the PM’s] Private Office”, “other officials in No 10”, “an official from No 10”, “Press Office officials”, “senior civil servants”.

There were also mentions of various groups which would have been aware of what was going on. Mentions were made of the No 10 Policy Unit, the No 10 Press Office, the Foreign Press Team, the Events & Visits Team, and the private offices of various named individuals. An invitation was also sent to a No 10 official involved with the Covid Press conference, saying. “In case you & others in the office today want to join after the presser.”. He replied saying, “Thank you will share with the team here”. The press conference on that day (20 May 2020) was led by Oliver Dowden, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, and the only other speaker there was Steve Powis, the National Medical Director at NHS England.

Also, one of the police officers on duty at No10 went into the Press Office on 18 December 2020, after an alarm had been set off. He observed a large number of people in the area outside of the main Press Office and one individual giving a speech. Inside the Press Office a further 15-20 people were present. This would have been around the time an awards ceremony was due to take place. Whether that would at the time have been taken as a work event or partying I don’t know.

So there is plenty of evidence that the civil servants and any other officials knew all about these events.

4.     Cabinet Office implicated

The Cabinet Office was heavily implicated in these parties. No 10 Downing Street and the Cabinet Office in 70 Whitehall are closely interconnected, with staff moving regularly between the two buildings as part of their daily work. Some of the gatherings happened in the Cabinet Office. Indeed, they were involved in some of the organisation. In her conclusions, Sue Gray writes: “I have already commented in my update on what I found to be failures of leadership and judgment in No 10 and the Cabinet Office”. She then directs the criticism to the politicians with: “The events that I investigated were attended by leaders in government. Many of these events should not have been allowed to happen. It is also the case that some of the more junior civil servants believed that their involvement in some of these events was permitted given the attendance of senior leaders”. But then she concedes: “The senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture”.

Yet in the Methodology in her interim report, included as an appendix, she distanced herself from the involvement of the Cabinet Office with: “In carrying out my investigation I have been supported by a small team of senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office, who have no connection with the events under examination and who are bound by the requirements of the Civil Service Code”. Yet if she is blaming a culture in the Cabinet Office, was she not part of that culture? In any case, who was in that team, and what did they know, and when?

Surely, in a culture which permits lying to parliament no-one should be taking anyone at their word over this. What does “no connection with the events under examination” mean? Does it mean that none of her team, had any prior knowledge of what was going on? One could be forgiven for inferring from her report that those parties, or some of them, must have been common knowledge in the Cabinet Office.

The position of Sue Gray is particularly interesting, because she took on the responsibility of investigating the events, claiming “no connection” with them. Sue Gray returned to the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, having served for a while in Northern Ireland, on 24 May 2021, as Second Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office. This was just after the events she would later be investigating had ended. It may be true that she had no connection with those events at the time, and indeed her primary interest around that time would have been Northern Ireland, but when the First Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet recused himself from heading the investigation, surely she would have been aware, or made herself aware, of what must have been common knowledge in the Cabinet Office. Having “no connection” at the time with the events does not mean that she would have no vested interests in the outcome of such an inquiry. She would hardly have been seen to be an independent investigator, given the culture within which she was working, and the position of many of her colleagues, to which she may have felt some loyalty. Before she was transferred to Northern Ireland she was director-general, of the propriety and ethics team, and head of the Private Offices Group, directly under the Cabinet Secretary. Had she, on return to the Cabinet Office, lost her ethical values?

5.     Sir Humphrey and the grey cardinal

A Profile published in Conservative Home in 2017 was headed ‘Sue Gray, civil servant – and “the most powerful woman in Britain” ’. Sue Gray, the article stated, “operates in carefully preserved obscurity. To the wider public, her very name is unknown”. In relation to a previous investigation, the article stated:

The likelihood is that after many years’ experience of this kind of crisis, for she has been in the Cabinet Office since the late 1990s, she already has a shrewd idea what the outcome of her inquiry will be. As another Whitehall insider who has watched her in action says, “She’ll know at once whether something’s a resigning matter.”

So would that now apply to Partygate, I wonder.

Liberal Democrat MP David Laws was part of David Cameron’s coalition Cabinet in 2016. The Daily Mail carried some excerpts from his memoirs, including a discussion with a colleague on Sue Gray, under a heading ‘It’s not me or you who runs this country, it’s a woman called Sue’. The excerpt ran:

I was meeting Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Letwin in the small restaurant tucked away in the No 10 basement. At one point, I quietly suggested a minor reorganisation of government. ‘My dear boy,’ said Oliver, chuckling. ‘It is simply impossible. Impossible.’ ‘Why?’ I replied. ‘If the PM wants it…’

‘Oh David, how charmingly naive you are,’ came the reply. ‘The PM doesn’t decide these things! When I was first in government, I assumed, like you, that if the PM wanted something, it just happened. Then I realised it wasn’t that simple; that power lies elsewhere. I assumed the Cabinet Secretary must be the real source of power. I was wrong there too. Then I suspected it must be the Head of the Home Civil Service – wrong again.’

Now shaking uncontrollably with laughter, and struggling to avoid spraying half-drunk coffee across the table, Oliver only just managed to blurt out: ‘It took me precisely two years before I realised finally who it is that runs Britain. Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray, the Head of Ethics or something in the Cabinet Office.

‘Unless she agrees, things just don’t happen. Cabinet reshuffles, departmental reorganisations, the whole lot – it’s all down to Sue Gray. Nothing moves in Whitehall unless Sue says so. She gets to censor our memoirs too! Our poor, deluded voters think the Prime Minister holds the reins of power. Wrong! The truth is our real leader, Sue Gray, sits at a small desk in the Cabinet Office. If only the Chinese and the Russians knew! They have probably been bugging all the wrong phones for years.’ He then descended into another fit of giggles.

6.     Poor deluded voters

That’s a slightly cut down version of the original, as it appeared in David Laws’ book, ‘COALITION: The Inside Story of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government’, but is equally authentic, since David Laws was the author of that article, too. The key part of that statement, to my mind, was “Our poor, deluded voters think the Prime Minister holds the reins of power. Wrong!” The problem will not be solved until the public is aware of the hidden hand of the deep state. This applies not just to government, but I think generally in campaigning groups that are at odds with the deep state, whether they know it or not. In my case, in the Esperanto association, we hadn’t a clue. The grey cardinal I was dealing with had been a high-level civil servant in Scotland, and put himself too much in the limelight, so much so that it became obvious to me through his interventions during my candidacy for their committee in 2005 that he was in charge. It now looks as if Sue Gray at last has made the same mistake, by allowing herself to be at the centre of the story, in accepting the role in investigating Partygate. Now that we are led to believe that “Nothing moves in Whitehall unless Sue says so”, we have to wonder who decided to ask her to lead the investigation. Was it Sue Gray? I drew attention to some of this in my article ‘The Confusion of Powers’. The point of that article was that if the Home Secretary signs the extradition warrant for Julian Assange, then the penny may drop amongst the silent majority about the ‘flexing’ of the Constitution, and Sue Gray’s role in the decision-making.

There’s a lesson there for everyone, because that pervades all sorts of campaigning organisations, and members are generally incredulous even when the evidence is obvious. All the evidence acquired by Sue Gray’s investigation into Partygate now needs to be made public. According to her report, the matierial has been handed over to the Cabinet Office Knowledge and Information team. Presumably that is where any requests under the Freedom of Information Act should be directed to, though it is said that Sue Gray is adept in advising how to avoid disclosure of information under the Act.

It should not be necessary to prove what Sue Gray knew in order to make the case that the Cabinet Office should not have been investigating itself. The possible conflict of interests should have been obvious to Sue Gray as soon as the First Permanent Secretary stepped down from that role. So why did she not recuse herself? It sounds like a set-up to me.

It seems to me that all the material held by the Cabinet Office Knowledge and Information team on this issue should be made public. That would be a first step in redressing the balance. Sue Gray should be challenged over her role, and kept in the limelight, not allowing her to proceed in her “carefully preserved obscurity”. The public should be made aware of control structures within government and many campaigning groups at grass roots level. The ‘poor deluded voters’ need to be undeluded. Only then can we be back on the path to democracy.