Rishi Sunak cannot escape the black hole of his predecessor’s failures

Wherever he goes, the PM finds some aspect of the past jumping out at him like a skeleton on a ghost train ride, writes Sean O’Grady

You almost find yourself feeling sorry for Sunak (Hand-out)

Like all the best political stories, it is beyond satire. The Partygate video seems like a lost scene from The Office, or an abandoned episode of The Thick of It; the “Pandemic Special”, pulled at the last minute because it was in such poor taste and so unbelievable.

Ricky Gervais and Armando Iannucci couldn’t really have done it better. The bunch of braying, embarrassing people doing their best to enjoy themselves in difficult circumstances; ones where they knew they were breaking the very rules they’d only lately dreamed up to apply to the public.

This painful irony is superbly alluded to because it is applied with the deftest of touches – the rather pathetic po-faced little A4 posters urging the maintenance of two-metre social distancing poignantly stick to the walls as they cheerfully and arrogantly ignore them.

The guy in the ridiculous 1980s yuppie-style red braces! He is Ben Mallett, who has now been honoured by Boris Johnson. For services to public health, obviously.

Yet there is much more concern on social media, I notice, for the chap in the green leisure trousers and (one assumes) his special Christmas jumper (an outrageous scandal in itself). He and a “lady in red” are trying to do some sort of jive, like the pair were contestants on Strictly. Or, indeed, like the Saturday Night Fever-inspired charity dance by Neil and Rachel in The Office Christmas special.

What we really needed was for Boris Johnson to jump in and do the David Brent monkey dance, and Matt Hancock to do a turn like Gareth Keenan. After all, Number 10 does seem to have been as well-run as the fictional Wernham-Hogg during the crisis, and Johnson is very much like Brent – someone who sees themself not so much as a boss or leader, but as an entertainer.

You really couldn’t choreograph bad dancing better than in the Partygate video, released by the Daily Mirror, and I long to see more. 

It’s not that new a story, because we’ve seen the equally comedy-cringe group photograph of them before, with Ben Mallet OBE lying on the floor in front of the rest, raising a glass of bubbly to hypocrisy. It is in fact a party for the team running the Conservative campaign to make Shaun Bailey, now Lord Bailey of Partygate, mayor of London thanks to Johnson/Brent’s indulgence. Bailey had apparently bailed out earlier.

Funnily enough – or perhaps not – the Metropolitan Police concluded from the available evidence at that point that no offence had taken place. The rest of us, badly offended actually, beg to differ.

It all proves just how baleful Johnson’s legacy of Partygate is, and how difficult it is for Rishi Sunak to escape the gravitational pull of that black hole in our national history (if I’ve got my astronomical terms right).

Wherever he goes, Sunak finds some aspect of Johnson’s past jumping out at him like a skeleton on a ghost train ride. As he contemplates a long hot summer of mortgage rate pain, small boat arrivals, strikes and stubborn inflation, Sunak has enough to contend with. But he’ll also be tripping over all the booby traps Johnson and his cronies have left behind.

There will be weekly by-election humiliations; revelations about the as-yet unmined Chequers Partygate material; a volume of self-serving spiteful memoirs from Johnson himself; the Saturday columns in the Daily Mail, when you never know which time Johnson will choose to launch an assault, or assaults, on the upstart snake he believes betrayed him and led the coup that pushed him out of office.

There may well be more Partygate videos, and more testimony from whistleblowers such as the one who confessed to the privileges committee that the public observance of the rules was just a pantomime for when the media cameras were pointing at them.

More even than that, Sunak must also cope with the rest of the aftermath of Johnson’s time in office: a botched Brexit; poisoned relations with Europe and America, and, now, Johnson’s unceasing, though futile, campaign to get himself back into power. You almost find yourself feeling sorry for Sunak, but, as a previous Tory leader put it so well, we can’t go on like this. Party’s over, guys.