I’ll try and do a Clav on it.
It was what Boris Johnson and his most senior aides had both feared and expected. Shortly before lunchtime on Tuesday, Downing Street took a call from the Metropolitan Police to inform the prime minister that he was on a list of thirty No 10 officials and staff who, they had just announced, would be issued with fines for breaching lockdown rules.
The only problem was that when the notification came, almost nobody was at the scene — so to speak — of the crime.
The prime minister and his wife were at Chequers, where Johnson was supposed to be taking a couple of days off in the Easter parliamentary recess. Steve Barclay, his chief of staff, had taken advantage of Johnson’s absence to head home to Cambridgeshire. Meanwhile, Guto Harri, Johnson’s new director of communications, appointed to begin clearing up the mess of partygate, was the most distant, with the fines interrupting an Easter break in Egypt.
Sunak still digesting the worst week of his political career and unaware it was about to get worse, was in his North Yorkshire constituency.
Downing Street had war-gamed how Johnson should respond to the fines when they came, but this was now made far trickier by two factors. Firstly, and perhaps ironically, they had to deal with the crisis through lockdown-style remote communication — highlighting why senior Downing Street staff had wanted to remain in No 10 during lockdown. Secondly, no-one had factored in the involvement of the chancellor.
Sunak had never expected to be fined. Unlike Johnson he had not been directly implicated in any of the six parties involving the prime minister that were being investigated by the Met. His only connection to “partygate” was a fleeting appearance towards the end of a ten-minute surprise birthday celebration held for Johnson in June 2020 in the cabinet room.
Sunak had not even been invited to the event, but had punctiliously turned up early for a Covid strategy meeting that was due to take place in the same room afterwards.
Believing in his own innocence, Sunak had always been explicit, both in parliament and in media appearances, that he had not attended any parties. He had even said in an interview that he did not expect to receive a police questionnaire.
Now here he was being fined for attending the event and potentially facing claims that he had misled parliament.
Sunak’s initial response was a mixture of fury at the police for deciding to fine him for what, at best, was a very inadvertent breach of lockdown rules and a strong feeling that, having been fined, the honourable thing to do was to resign.
Tired and bruised by the previous week’s storm over his wife’s tax affairs, the chancellor felt that it might be better just to walk away from frontline politics for a while than be tarred by what he felt was an already pretty untenable situation in trying to ride out the storm.
Another factor in his calculation was a belief that Johnson intended to move him at the next reshuffle. He suspected that Sir Lynton Crosby, the prime minister’s long-standing elections guru, was gunning for him and had told Johnson he should not go into the next election with a cost-of-living crisis and a chancellor whose personal wealth was far beyond what most ordinary voters could conceive of.
Sunak felt, allies said, as though he was becoming a lame duck chancellor and it might be better to simply quit over partygate and get some credit for acting honourably.
But Sunak decided not to share his concerns with Johnson when the pair spoke on the phone shortly before Downing Street announced the fines. It was agreed that both men — along with Carrie Johnson, who had also been fined — would announce they were paying up, then apologise and try and move on. Afterwards staff in No 10 made it known that all appeared to be OK with Sunak.
Harri, in Egypt, was involved in drafting a statement from Downing Street while plans were put in place to pay the fines as soon as they were formally issued. And for most of the afternoon Harri and other advisers concentrated on the prime minister and exactly what he should say in a statement to be recorded in time for the news at 6pm.
On the one hand his strong personal inclination was to quit — though making clear while doing so that he did not think the prime minister should follow suit.
But aides, also operating remotely, pointed out that whatever his intentions, any resignation would be seen by Tory MPs as regicide and it would become very hard to recover his political career, let alone his chances of succeeding Johnson in No 10.
“In some way Rishi’s aides are more ambitious for him than he is for himself,” one senior Tory said.
Six hours after he first found out about the fine, Sunak was still debating what to do. By this point his aides would not deny he was considering quitting and the Westminster rumour mill finally caught up with North Yorkshire.
There was a wobble in Downing Street,” said one aide. “They thought everything was fine but then the rumours started. The fact that Sunak had not said anything at all rang alarm bells.”
Yet it was still not until 8.30pm that the Treasury issued a short, terse statement indicating that Sunak had decided not to commit, as one government adviser put it, “hari-kari”.
While Downing Street was relieved that Sunak did not go — “Rishi quitting would have brought everything crashing down,” one minister said — there is vituperation in government circles for a chancellor who seems to teeter towards the brink with increasing rapidity.
“There’s only so many times you can say you’re an honourable man without doing anything about it,” one senior source said. “Tuesday night was the time for Rishi to quit and he hasn’t done it.”
Others think that there remain irreconcilable economic differences between Sunak, a fiscal conservative who might have been better suited to the Cameron years, and the more profligate Johnson.
“Rishi’s problems are still economic,” a minister said. “I don’t think his position [on the cost of living] can hold. The problem Boris has is that he wants to say yes to everything, whereas Rishi’s instinct is that we have to be careful.
“You see him almost wincing, especially at PMQs when Boris says ‘yes, yes, yes’ to everything.”
The minister added: “But people can always get around Rishi by going to the PM, even more so now. What’s the point of Rishi sitting there with a calculator when there are ways around the calculator?”
Both Sunak’s wobble and the fear that more fines for Johnson are almost inevitable have unnerved Conservative MPs.
One senior backbencher said Johnson’s contention that he didn’t realise he was breaking the rules was just an attempt at a defence against knowingly misleading parliament, which would result in his resignation.
“This isn’t necessarily the last fine, he may get more than one, and he will find it more difficult if there are more fines,” they said.
Another senior MP, surveying the prospect of a long period with periodic fines, said: “People will snap at different points.”
Even many of those Conservatives publicly claiming it would be irresponsible to replace Johnson as it would undermine Britain’s support for Ukraine give the argument short shrift in private.
“It’s obviously nonsense,” one said. “Think about what the incentives would be for candidates in a leadership election — they’ll be falling over themselves to send the most weapons. If anything, a contest would harden our position on Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, Johnson — who was arguably fortunate to be fined when parliament was not sitting — will have to defend himself in the Commons on Tuesday when he makes a statement. The prime minister sheepishly said that he would “set the record straight in any way that I can”.
Whether he adopts the right tone could help determine the future of his premiership. Asked how contrite Johnson would be, one aide replied: “Not contrite enough.”