Health News at Your Fingertips

Covid inquiry should cover impact of Partygate and Barnard Castle on support for lockdown rules, MPs told

Robert Booth

Downing Street is facing fresh calls to widen the terms of the Covid-19 public inquiry to cover the impact of its own lockdown breaches, including Partygate and Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle.

A grieving daughter told MPs and peers investigating the pandemic that rule breaking by the rule makers should be included in the scope of the inquiry, which is still yet to be formally established.

The draft terms of reference, which are due to be finalised by the prime minister, Boris Johnson, do not include the impact of the breaches, which have led to fixed penalty notices for the PM, chancellor and numerous Downing Street officials.

Rabinder Sherwood, who lost both her parents to Covid in January 2021, said: “Any rule breaking by the rule makers should be included in the scope of the inquiry.”

She told the all party parliamentary group on coronavirus that while ministers were breaking the rules, her family took the “painful decision” to tell her parents why they were having to keep socially distanced. That was particularly hard for her father, who suffered from dementia.

Stephen Reicher, professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews and a participant in the SPI-B group of the government’s SAGE committee, said:

There is no doubt that, starting with Barnard Castle, the sense of one law for them and one law for us undermined trust.

Sir Geoff Mulgan, professor of collective intelligence, public policy and social innovation at University College where international Covid inquiries are being monitored, predicted the process could take three to four years to complete. He said it would require the chair, Dame Barbara Hallett to set up several parallel inquiries. That suggests final results are unlikely to be available until after the next general election, likely in 2024.

Elkan Abrahamson, a lawyer representing the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Group, said they had not seen the amended terms of reference which will go from the chair to the PM for his approval, making bereaved families “supplicants” rather than participants in setting the agenda. He went on:

Already the openness that we’d hoped for from the inquiry seems to be ebbing away and that is a real concern.

Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, has said she could intervene over local newspaper group Newsquest’s takeover of rival Archant, PA Media reports. PA says:

Last month, Newsquest, which publishes titles including the Northern Echo and Lancashire Telegraph, sealed the deal to buy the East Anglia-based competitor.

Archant, which was being sold by private equity firm Rcapital, owns a number of local newspaper brands in East Anglia, including the Eastern Daily Press and Norwich Evening News, alongside a portfolio of regional Country Life magazines, and employs 760 staff.

In a written ministerial statement Dorries said she was “minded” to issue an intervention notice, which would lead to the move being blocked. She has “plurality concerns” over how the merger could impact competition where the two firms operate.

Keir Starmer has also said he hopes that the controversy about the Mail on Sunday’s sexist reporting of Angela Rayner leads to a change of culture at Westminster. He said:

The Speaker obviously needs to be happy that the way we all treat each other in parliament is appropriate and with respect and obviously he will make his own decisions in that respect.

But I think all of us have got a responsibility not just to call this out but to renew our determination to change the culture in parliament because this is awful for Angela.

I’ve got a young girl and I worry about her seeing this environment. We all have to change it.

Heating bill increases of up to 150% will lead to the widespread closures of UK swimming pools without an emergency government bailout, ministers have been told. My colleague Matthew Weaver has the story here.

Keir Starmer has rejected claims that Labour has let Partygate distract from its campaigning on the cost of living.

According to a HuffPost story by Kevin Schofield, Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, complained at shadow cabinet last week that the party was focusing too much on Partygate. In the Commons last week Starmer spoke about Partygate three times: in response to Boris Johnson’s statement on the the matter on Tuesday, at PMQs on Wednesday, and in the debate on the privileges committee on Thursday.

Schofield says:

Nandy said there was a danger that voters would think “we’re all as bad as each other” if Labour continued to focus on Boris Johnson’s woes over lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street. She said Labour risked looking “out of touch” at a time when families across the country are struggling to make ends meet.

But Schofield also says that other members of the shadow cabinet did not agree with Nandy’s point.

Asked about this today, Starmer insisted that Labour’s campaign had remained focused on the cost of living. He said:

When we started the campaign, we had a laser-like focus on the cost of living and we’ve maintained that throughout.

Starmer also restated Labour’s call for an emergency budget (see 10.10am), saying that this was what the country needed, not a cabinet meeting. He said:

The cost-of-living crisis has been staring us in the face for six months now and it’s a real problem for people struggling with their bills – and the cabinet meeting this morning isn’t going to change any of that.

The BBC has a report with more on Boris Johnson’s threat to privatise the Passport Office if services do not improve. The news was originally leaked to the Evening Standard. (See 1.14pm.)

As the BBC’s Nick Eardley reports, bosses from the agency are expected to be called in for talks next week. Eardley says the PM sees this as a cost of living issue, because people are having to pay for the premium service to get their passport on time because of the delays, and he thinks privatisation could provide better value for money.

Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, tabled an urgent question in the Commons earlier to Boris Johnson, asking him for a statement about his trip to India. Johnson did not respond (the government decides who responds to a UQ, not the person tabling the question), and instead Vicky Ford, the Foreign Office minister, replied to Blackford. Blackford accused Johnson of not doing his job properly. He said:

There is a clear convention that prime ministers have a duty to update this house following their attendance at major summits or following significant visits. This convention has been respected and followed by all prime ministers in recent years, but like on so many other matters, the only exception to that rule is the current prime minister.

Following his visit last week the prime minister should have come to this house and given an update, he has once again failed to do so. Instead he chose to go campaigning for his party in the local elections, though I suspect that won’t do them much good.

This prime minister failing to come before this house is by no means a one-off. He has failed to come before the house after the extraordinary Nato summit in March. There is a very clear pattern here. This is a prime minister who has no respect for the office he occupies and even less respect for this house.

According to a report by David Bond in the Evening Standard, at cabinet Boris Johnson told colleagues he wanted to “privatise the arse” of bodies like the Passport Office and the DVLA that fail to provide a satisfactory service. Bond says:

Boris Johnson has threatened to “privatise the arse” off the Passport Office, DVLA and other “arms-length” public bodies unless they start delivering better services.

Urging his cabinet ministers to come up with creative ways to help ease the growing cost of living crisis, the prime minister also pledged to increase scrutiny of the “post-Covid mañana culture” at some public bodies which have come in for criticism for failing to abandon working practices introduced during the crisis.

This morning the Times has splashed on a story saying holidays are at risk because of delays in processing passports. The DVLA is also having problems dealing with demand for driving licences.

And here are some more lines from the Downing Street lobby briefing.

• Downing Street played down suggestions that the extra bank holiday being held this year in honour of the Queen’s platinum jubilee could become a permanent event. The idea has been widely floated in the media.

But the PM’s spokesperson said he was not aware of any plans to make the bank holiday permanent. He said each bank holiday “presents a considerable and significant cost to our economy and therefore each proposal would have to be considered carefully on that basis”.

• Boris Johnson has still not had a call with Emmanuel Macron, the French president, following his re-election on Sunday, the spokesperson revealed.

• The spokesperson did not deny a Sun report saying ministers are looking at plans to cut tariffs to make imports cheaper for consumers.

• The spokesperson would not comment on reports that Boris Johnson has not yet received a questionnaire from the Metropolitan police about his attendance at the party in the No 10 garden on 20 May 2020. Some fines have already been issued in connection with this, but Johnson has reportedly not been asked about it. In the Times today Steven Swinford says Johnson is “increasingly confident” that he will not be fined over this event. Sources think the Met has accepted the PM’s argument that he did not break the rules because Downing Street is his home and so he was in his own garden.

No 10 has given a fresh hint that ministers will relax the rules to allow nurseries to have fewer members of staff to help parents with costs.

In a statement about today’s cabinet, where the focus was on the cost of living, the prime minister’s spokesperson told the morning lobby briefing:

The prime minister said that, whilst our recovery from the global pandemic was faster than anybody previously expected, continued disruptions in the global economy, including in China where widespread lockdowns are still taking place – coupled with Putin’s continued crazed malevolence in Ukraine – meant the public was facing real pressures and that the government would continue to be on their side.

He said there was more to do, including in areas like childcare, to further ease pressures for those that need it most and to get even more people into high skilled, high-wage jobs.

This seemed to be a reference to plans, that have been floated before, to reduce the staff/child ratios for nurseries. As Nursery World reported last year, one plan was to allow nursery staff to supervise five children under two, rather than three, as the current rules stipulate.

Downing Street said earlier that Johnson was particularly keen to find measures that would cut costs for people without requiring the government to spend more money. (See 9.17am.)

Asked to give more details, the spokesperson said:

I think all I can say is that this is an area where the government recognises there is more to do. It is live policy work taking place and I’m sure we’ll have more to say in the future.

The spokesperson also revealed that Johnson would be personally chairing meetings of the cabinet’s domestic and economic strategy committee to finalise measures that might help people deal with the cost of living. Ministers talked through “a number of ideas” during cabinet meeting, the spokesperson said, and they would “feed into a more formal process”.

I will post more from the lobby briefing shortly.

At the standards committee hearing Michael Ellis, the Cabinet Office minister, also defended Priti Patel’s decision to accept a free ticket to the premiere of a James Bond movie, saying that it was relevant to her work as home secretary. These are from Insider’s Henry Dyer.

UPDATE: Here is the clip.