What really gets Sue Gray’s goat is that there is no black and white between public and private or business and pleasure
“I THINK THE PROBLEM IS Boris is running a modern government like a medieval court,” declared Andrew Mitchell MP in the wake of the publication of Sue Gray’s eviscerated report. Instead, he continued, “You need to rule and govern through the structures, through Whitehall, through the Cabinet and National Security Council.”
Setting aside the yah-boo word “medieval”, Mitchell’s description of the Johnson regime as a “court” is accurate, even perceptive. But his critique gets things precisely the wrong way round. It is the “court” aspects of Johnson’s government which have delivered its few notable successes and Mitchell’s much-vaunted formal governmental “structures” which have produced its long catalogue of disasters.
In my article for the , I said that we needed radically to revise our understanding of the premiership. The prime minister was a monarch, I argued, Downing Street a palace and its inhabitants a court. Now, on cue, the revelations of “Partygate”, even in Gray’s bowdlerised account, offer the incontrovertible documentary proof.
