Labour: No faith in No.10 parties investigation as Cabinet Secretary quits

MPs yesterday demanded an independent investigator is enlisted to lead the inquiry into Downing Street’s lockdown parties after the civil servant originally in charge stood down because of an event in his office.

Cabinet Secretary Simon Case had been selected to lead the inquiry into a number of alleged gatherings, but quit on Friday night after it emerged a quiz was held in his own department during lockdown last December that he had spoken at. Email invites had been headed “Christmas Party.”

The development was another blow to Boris Johnson’s authority as an increasing number of Tory MPs openly question whether he can remain in post as prime minister.

The past week has seen the overturning of one of the biggest Tory majorities in the country in Thursday’s North Shropshire by-election defeat to the Lib Dems in a previously impregnable Tory stronghold after the biggest rebellion of Johnson’s leadership with nearly 100 Tory MPs voting against Covid passes.

Another senior civil servant, Sue Gray, yesterday took charge of the inquiry into three alleged gatherings at Downing Street and the Department for Education in November and December last year, when indoor mixing was banned.

Gray is second permanent secretary at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and previously director-general of propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office from 2012 to 2018. However, Ian Murray, Labour’s Shadow Scottish Secretary, said: “First we had a party being investigated that people have already resigned over, yet the PM still claims it didn’t happen.

“With each new revelation of parties, there is growing evidence of a culture of one rule for us, another rule for them.

“Labour made it clear when the investigation was launched that the person in charge should be uncompromised and able to make a fair and independent judgment. It’s clear there now needs to be an independent figure leading this probe from outwith the government.”

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Gray oversaw the Plebgate inquiry in 2012 after former chief whip Andrew Mitchell was accused of calling a policeman a “pleb” at the Downing Street gates.

She was described as “deputy God” by then Labour MP Paul Flynn in a meeting of Parliament’s Public Administration Committee the same year.

Former Tory MP and Cabinet office minister Oliver Letwin is reported to have said of Gray: “It took me precisely two years before I realised 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.”

She is also part of the panel deciding on who will be next chair of the media regulator Ofcom.

Gray was once described by BBC Newsnight’s then policy editor as “the most powerful person you’ve never heard of”.

The inquiry comes after a string of claims about parties and gatherings held across Whitehall while London was under restrictions limiting people from meeting indoors

Chris Bryant, chair of the Committee on Standards, said the situation over the parties in Whitehall was “farcical” and Downing Street was “completely dysfunctional”.

He urged Grey to hand any evidence she found of lawbreaking over to the police.

The Labour MP said: “In the end, the final analysis has to be done by a completely independent person. I think that that should be the police.”

The SNP’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, said “having somebody else from the Civil Service marking their own isn’t good enough”.

He said: “It needs to be someone from authority from outwith Government, from outwith the Civil Service. I would suggest that the best way to do that would be by having a judge-led inquiry”.