Agreed - 
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Apologies for keeping you awake - you should go somewhere else to sleep - meanwhile:
The night before Prince Philip’s funeral
Two events took place on 16 April 2021 - the day before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral - for the departure of a senior No 10 official and another No 10 official.
Alcohol was available and the events lasted for several hours, the prime minister was “not in residence”.
One event had invites sent out for it on 7 April. At least 77 members of staff in No 10 were invited, including those from the prime minister’s private office. The other was organised on the day.
The first event, pre-planned, had 45 people in attendance and lasted for about an hour. Wine and beer was brought by staff and was consumed during some of the speeches.
Some staff continued “chatting and drinking” beyond the end time of the event, and some were present when No 10 was being “locked down for the evening”. A security team member asked them to leave, and they moved to the garden.
The second event, organised on the day, was held at approximately the same time, but was smaller, with about 15 to 20 people. Music was played on a laptop on top of a printer, and a “number of those present drank excessively”.
There was mingling between these two events, the report says, the two groups eventually joined together in the Downing Street garden. Shortly before 21:30, there were over 20 people in the garden, with a number of bottles of alcohol.
A number of individuals gathered near a child’s swing/slide in the garden, and it was damaged by staff playing with it and leaning on it.
A member of security staff started locking down the building at 21:30, and noticed groups in the garden.
No 10 entry/exit logs show that a number left at this point, but some remained in the building and carried on drinking until the early hours.
Exit logs indicate some left after midnight and others between 01:45 and 02:45. Two staff stayed later still, one leaving at 03:11 and the last leaving at 04:20.
How disrepectful … 
Johnson wasn’t there - a lot of those people were actually civil servants.
Press Conference in progress
Are you a liar?
Paul Brand, the ITV journalist behind several Partygate exclusives, says the PM saw what was going on in his home, participated in it and made the rules. “So, it does beg the question: are you a liar?” he asks.
“No,” Johnson replies.
Were people in the press office told to lie?
The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot points out that people in the press office told journalists that there were no parties, and now we now from Sue Gray’s report that there were parties in the press office itself. Were they told to lie?
Johnson says: “I don’t know what they told you.”
“I certainly don’t think they set out to deceive you,” he says.
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Tomorrow this will be over for Boris.
But not for Starmer or Rayner.
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PM’s message: It’s time to move on
David Wallace Lockhart
BBC political correspondent
There are a few clear themes in how Boris Johnson wants to deal with question about Partygate.
He insists he didn’t think any rules were being broken, even at the event he was ultimately fined for.
But he accepts the rules were breached and he takes responsibility for this.
And finally - and most importantly in Boris Johnson’s eyes - it’s time to move on. He insists it’s time to deliver what he calls the “people’s priorities”. He’s so passionate about this he’s even banging the lectern to emphasise it.
But plenty of people will think it’s too early to move on, regardless of other factors affecting people’s lives.
BJ sticks to the hymn-sheets - if he sings the verses long enough and loud enough then maybe the non-gullibles will start to believe the “message” … 
And me
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How rude.
The view from the USA:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson presided over a disorderly workplace in which there were widespread violations of coronavirus restrictions, according to a long-awaited government investigation released on Wednesday that is a moment of reckoning for the scandal-scarred British leader.
The report, by a senior civil servant, Sue Gray, included photographs of Mr. Johnson’s raising a glass at a birthday party held in his honor, an event that breached the rules and for which he paid a police fine. It noted that 83 people violated the rules at parties, during which some drank heavily, fought with each other and damaged property.
Even if the report by Sue Gray did not contain major new disclosures, it offered a litany of details about how officials inside the prime minister’s office organized social gatherings — including a picture of a louche Downing Street where Boris Johnson’s media office regularly held an event known as “Wine Time Friday.”
Ms. Gray noted that “many will be dismayed that behavior of this kind took place on this scale at the heart of Government.” She said she was told of “multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff,” which she described as unacceptable.
“The public have a right to expect the very highest standards of behavior in such places and clearly what happened fell well short of this,” she wrote.
The leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, described the report as a “monument to the hubris and arrogance of a government that believed it is one rule for them and another rule for everyone else. This report lays bare the rot that under this prime minister has spread in 10 Downing Street. And it provides definitive proof of how those within that building treated the sacrifices of the British people with utter contempt.”
Many unanswered questions remain
Mark Easton
Home editor
“I’m waiting for Sue Gray” became almost a catchphrase in Westminster, rumours of how devastating her report would be getting louder with each passing week.
But it has proved to be far less revealing than some had suspected. The nine published photographs are just a fraction of the hundreds of pictures seen by Sue Gray’s inquiry team. What is not in today’s report poses as many questions as what is.
For example, after the boozy leaving-do pictured in some of the photos, a separate gathering took place in the prime minister’s flat. But Sue Gray didn’t investigate it. Nor other gatherings that her team had not already looked at when Scotland Yard began its investigation in January.
“I have taken the view that it would not be necessary, appropriate or proportionate to undertake any further investigation work following the conclusion of the work of the Metropolitan Police,” Sue Gray says in her report.
In other words, the police inquiry didn’t just pause the Gray inquiry – it stopped it in its tracks.
We do know that just before Christmas in 2020, at one of the weekly “Wine Time Friday” events, someone accidentally triggered a panic alarm in Number 10 and a police officer on door duty raced to see what was happening. He found a crowded and noisy event with 15 to 20 people eating and drinking, some excessively.
What we don’t know is why the officer apparently took no action. After all that waiting, many questions still remain unanswered. And that makes it harder to restore the public’s faith that those who make the rules won’t break the rules.
Someone put the kibosh on the details of the dirty deeds … 
Six months of wall-to-wall media hysteria.
Constant opposition calls – even from lockdown beer swilling and curry munching Slippery Starmer – to overturn Boris Johnson’s landslide 2019 election mandate.
Even claims from the apparently impartial ITV News political editor Robert Peston that the UK is heading towards an ‘elected dictatorship’ if the PM isn’t forced from office immediately and presumably replaced with a more ‘acceptable’ lockdown loving remoaner.
The Sue Gray report into what’s become known as ‘Partygate’ must have been pretty goddamn sensational to justify such ongoing hysteria from our MSM, right?
Especially at a time of a European war, once-in-a-generation pandemic recovery and unparalleled cost-of-living crisis…
Hardly!
She’s just delivered a damp squib, lacking anything close to a smoking gun that would encourage disloyal Tory MPs to depose BoJo.
For me, this entire farce is about perspective.
I was as effing livid as anyone last December when the initial reports emerged of officials at Number 10 Downing Street quaffing champagne while we were told to cower in our homes.
But I wasn’t surprised.
The lockdown laws were the most unprecedented and frankly disgusting theft of our civil liberties and freedom in modern history.
They were inhumane and should have been unconscionable anywhere outside of communist China and North Korea.
None of our so-called leaders – be it Boris or Starmer or Sturgeon – followed them.
None of us should have followed them either.
But somehow today in the frenzied big screen analysis on Sly News of the exact positioning of the orange juice, apples, M&S sandwiches and, yes, empty alcohol bottles at a miserable looking Number 10 ‘gathering’, that point has been missed.
Now I’ve read all 49 pages of the report.
It paints an unsurprising picture of out of touch government officials with no idea of the hardships they had inflicted on ordinary folk.
But it’s lacking in anything like the picture of Ibiza-style parties the MSM have painted.
For example, The Guardian’s so-called bombshell photo showing groups in the Downing Street garden on May 15 2020 was, in fact, a series of legitimate outdoor meetings, something encouraged at the time. The PM, who was there from 6pm to 7.20pm, had brought down cheese and wine from his home, which uniquely doubles as his workplace.
The garden party on May 20 2020, when we were only legally allowed to meet with one person outdoors, was an inexcusable oversight. But the event was clearly not organised with malicious intent – the idea was to celebrate Number 10 staff, who had been working around the clock, outdoors in a ‘socially distanced’ manner, given the good weather.
Like at all the other work events, the PM was there only briefly, in this case between 6pm and 6.30pm, to thank the up to 40 staff who had gathered in the garden.
But the infamous ‘bring your own booze’ note by the PM’s Principal Private Secretary Martin Reynolds, who seemed to be party organiser in chief, rightly sealed his fate – he was part of a clear out of the management at Number 10.
As I read through the various WhatsApp messages and emails, it does indicate the staff at Number 10 had no idea of the sacrifices so many of us were making at that point by locking ourselves indoors on our own.
But, aside from one or two junior staffers who couldn’t handle their booze, the ‘parties’ were largely leaving drinks for departing colleagues or Christmas Zoom quizzes, where the staff who weren’t working from home took part in person.
At the leaving do for his departing Director of Communications Lee Cain on November 13 2020, for example, Boris was in attendance briefly at 7.17pm, before joining his wife and five special advisers upstairs in the Downing Street flat for the so-called Abba-themed Winner Takes It All meeting, following the exit of Dominic Cummings.
At another leaving do on November 27, the PM gave a short speech between meetings at 6.19pm and 6.45pm. The departing staff member had left the building herself by 6.58pm.
At the Zoom Quiz on December 11 2020, where in person staff were ordered to follow social distancing rules, the Prime Minister joined at 7.50pm to read out the questions for one of the rounds, staying for a grand total of 12 minutes before returning to work in his office.
Gray’s report made obvious to me the need for human contact while at work. In normal times, all the gatherings would have been completely understandable and posed no risk to anyone’s health, given these folk had been working together all day anyway. It’s a right that should have been extended to the rest of the country.
The most damning line from Gray actually related to the treatment of Downing Street cleaners and security guards.
She wrote: ‘I was made aware of multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff. This was unacceptable.’
Shame on those people, who should take a long hard look at themselves.
But what really matters in the report is the ‘gathering’ in the Cabinet room on June 19 2020, the only incident for which Boris (and his Chancellor Rishi Sunak) have received a fixed penalty notice from the Met police.
The published photos make clear it was not a party – there’s no birthday cake in sight.
In fact, all I could see was a bunch of crusty M&S sandwiches and sad looking fruit, and an equally uncomfortable looking Chancellor, who no doubt just wanted to get on with his next meeting.
Critically, Gray confirms Boris and Rishi were ‘not aware of this event in advance’ and it did not form part of the day’s official diary.
She explains: ‘(Boris) returned from an external visit to No 10 Downing Street at approximately 2.20pm and was taken into the Cabinet Room which had been set up with sandwiches, snacks, soft drinks and cans of beer.’
Gray reports the gathering lasted for just 20 minutes, with the PM’s wife Carrie Johnson in attendance.
Rishi was only there ‘briefly’ because he ‘arrived early’ for the next meeting.
I’m sorry, if anyone is prepared to argue that a 20-minute presentation of some crappy sandwiches between meetings is genuinely reason to throw the country into chaos at a time of economic crisis then they’re nothing more than a partisan shill.
When this scandal emerged, I was clear that to regain my faith Boris had to free Britain fully from the Covid tyranny that has haunted us for much of the last two years.
So far, he has delivered on that front, with England the freest country in the western world.
I am literally exhausted with talking about these low-level rule breaking gatherings involving a few civil servants, many of whom have already fallen on their sword.
Our country deserves better than a campaigning mainstream media, led by the publicly funded BBC, who will stop at nothing to remove the Prime Minister from office.
Of course, there should be scrutiny. But nobody can tell me the official scrutiny of these events has been anything other than exhaustive.
There was no smoking gun in the Met police investigation, nor in Gray’s fully published report today.
Partygate was wrong, but it’s also over.
The country and Boris deserve the chance to move on.
The country deserve a decent and moral government. With the present government we have neither.
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Like for like, I think not, yesterdays politics have long gone
Regardless of his politics Boris is a weak man.He has no moral compass and this influences the actions of his subordinates.This sort of bending the rules will happen all the time.
It was wrong of Boris but it is a bit hypocritical of Starmer and Sturgeon to criticise when they have also done the same thing.
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Who will replace the government then? Starmer and his cronies are also guilty of partying at the Durham miners gala. The Lib Dems and Greens have no experience at doing the job
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No, they haven’t.
No, they’re not.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak was photographed at the Prime Minister’s birthday event, where a large number of sandwiches and glasses of juice were available
Are those “markdown” stickers on the sandwiches?
There are some political sympathisers on here who wouldn’t recognise a Party if it smacked them in the face. 
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