the times | Thursday May 26 2022 33
Leading articles
is still shocking. It includes Downing Street staff
partying drunkenly into the early hours as Prince
Philip’s body lay awaiting his funeral.
Few will forget the picture of the Queen sitting
alone in the pews of Westminster Abbey. And
while the public know she will always do her duty,
few are surprised when Mr Johnson fails to do his.
That divergence exemplifies the Downing Street
parties scandal. While stating that he takes “full
responsibility” the prime minister gave casuistical
justifications for behaviour. He insisted that
attending colleagues’ leaving drinks was “one of
the essential duties of leadership”. The notion that
the essence of leadership in a national emergency
is to share the hardships of ordinary citizens
appears not to have occurred to him.
Moreover there are idiosyncrasies and
omissions in Ms Gray’s report. There is only a
passing reference to the so-called Abba party
held at Mr Johnson’s flat in November 2020. Ms
Gray says she stopped her inquiries so as not to
prejudice a police investigation which itself
ignored the same party. In fact the Metropolitan
Police has behaved in a capricious manner that
has complicated her task and disserves justice.
The photographic evidence in the report shows
Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, laughingalongside the prime minister at a birthday party
in June 2020. Yet Mr Case escaped punishment
whereas Rishi Sunak, who had not been told
about the party but turned up early for another
meeting, was fined.
Mr Case should have demanded propriety in
government; Mr Johnson had the duty to observe
it. Neither did so, and Ms Gray’s failure to spell out
sanctions against them will frustrate critics. Yet
the litany of failings ought to be a matter of shame
for all involved. After the notorious garden party
in May 2020, Martin Reynolds, the prime minis-
ter’s principal private secretary, boasted that “we
seem to have got away with [it]”. Now he is in line
for a plum ambassadorship.
Unforgivably, the report mentions rudeness by
officials to cleaning and security staff. The culture
of entitlement that such conduct lays bare will fur-
ther corrode public faith in government. Amid his
various defences, Mr Johnson claimed the parties
he attended were “appropriate” because they were
part of work and covered by an exemption to the
Covid rules. Again and again, the prime minister
evades moral accountability and hides behind le-
galistic quibbling, heedless of the responsibilities
and dignity of his office. It is a sorry tale that will
breed cynicism and draw contempt.than elsewhere in the West is explicable. In Brit-
ain, regulation of firearms is strict. After the
massacre at Hungerford in 1987, semi-automatic
and pump-action weapons were outlawed. In the
aftermath of the murder of 16 children and their
teacher in Dunblane, all handguns were banned.
Guidelines on firearm licensing were tightened to
require applicants to obtain a medical report and
undergo social media checks after the Plymouth
shootings last year, the first in Britain in a decade.
Mass shootings in Canada, Australia and New
Zealand have all been met with prompt reform of
firearms law.
The effects are plain to see. In 2020, only 4 per
cent of homicides in Britain involved guns. In Aus-
tralia the equivalent figure was 13 per cent, and in
Canada it was 37 per cent. In the US, where gun
ownership is widely regarded as a constitutional
right rather than a heavily regulated exception to
the rules, it was 79 per cent.
There are more than 500,000 people in
England and Wales who legally own firearms, but
guns account for less than 1 per cent of recorded
crime. Such figures belie the received wisdom thatto legislate quickly in the wake of a tragedy
inevitably leads to bad policy. All the evidence
from western democratic societies suggests the
opposite is true. The harder it is for a population to
obtain firearms, the less likely mass shootings are
to occur.
None of this is lost on Mr Biden. During the
presidential campaign of 2020 he pledged to re-
strict the sale of military-style assault weapons
and high-capacity magazines. Yet the ultimate
tragedy is that senseless killings such as the attack
in Uvalde are unlikely to be the spur to reform they
have proven to be elsewhere. Polling suggests
support for stricter gun laws is falling despite the
persistence of mass shootings. Already, advocates
for gun reform have been denounced for “politicis-
ing” the shooting by Ted Cruz, the Republican
senator for Texas.
Such controversy is a tragic symptom of the
polarisation that has riven American life. The in-
discriminate slaughter of young children should
bring a country together in mourning. Instead, it
looks set to perpetuate divisions that have made
reform so intractable.In tropical areas of dense vegetation, lidar de-
vices are proving invaluable in discovering evi-
dence of once-flourishing civilisations thought to
have been lost to history, swallowed up by centu-
ries of jungle growth. A paper in the scientific jour-
nal Nature has revealed that researchers used lidar
to scan an area of rainforest in Bolivia. The area is
known to have been the heartland of the Casarabe
culture between AD500 and 1400.
The team documented 26 sites indicating
human settlement, half of which were undiscov-
ered, two of which appear to have constituted siza-
ble urban centres, larger and more complex thanany other pre-Columbian sites in the region. This
evidence suggests these indigenous Amazonians
were more numerous and sophisticated than
scholars had previously thought.
Other recent lidar-inspired discoveries in
Central America support similar rethinking about
the extent and nature of ancient Mayan civilisa-
tion. In 2013, lidar surveys helped uncover the
Khmer city of Mahendraparvata in Cambodia.
Years of guesswork, and months of gruelling field-
work, are being supplanted by a piece of relatively
cheap tech. Indiana Jones and his trusty machete
are no longer required.Party Politics
The Gray report on illicit Downing Street parties sets out a litany of
cynicism and illegality that brings shame on Boris Johnson’s administration
No one expects politicians to be saintly. But voters
do expect those who set the rules to abide by them.
The report by Sue Gray, a civil servant, on Down-
ing Street parties during lockdown sets out a dis-
mal failure to adhere to this minimal requirement
of public service. Ms Gray notes, with understate-
ment, that the public will be “dismayed that behav-
iour of this kind took place on this scale at the
heart of government”.
In fact the public seem more outraged than dis-
mayed. And who can blame them? They complied
with restrictions that prevented many from
attending funerals of loved ones or visiting their
dying relatives in hospital. The conduct of Down-
ing Street staff evinces something worse than in-
difference to the same rules. Ms Gray’s report
demonstrates that, in knowingly breaching Covid
requirements, they treated it as a joke. This epi-
sode shows that the ethos of public service has
been debased.
The immediate question posed by the report is
how far Boris Johnson is damaged by the further
revelations. The conclusion is that his reputation
is substantially harmed but he is not mortally
wounded. His critics may charge that it was always
likely that a civil servant’s inquiry into her boss
would lack a final sting, but the evidence it sets outDivided Republic
Tighter gun laws in America are much needed but near impossible to achieve
When 20 children and six women were shot dead
at a primary school in the Connecticut village of
Sandy Hook in 2012, President Obama promised
to take “meaningful action” to tighten gun control
in the United States. A decade later, President
Biden is reckoning with a similar atrocity. The
murder of at least 19 schoolchildren and two
adults by a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, prompts the
same disquieting question asked in the wake of
more than 900 others in the intervening ten years.
As Mr Biden said: “These kinds of mass shootings
rarely happen anywhere else in the world... Why
are we willing to live with this carnage?”
It is ultimately for the American people to an-
swer that question. But on the statistics, Mr Biden
is right. To live in the US is to endure far greater
risk of gun violence than almost anywhere else in
the western world. Indeed, it is only two weeks
since another teenager shot dead ten people at a
supermarket in Buffalo, New York, one of more
than 200 mass shootings to have taken place in
America this year. That there will be many more
before the year is out is a racing certainty.
But the fact it happens much more in AmericaOn the Map
New technology is uncovering long-lost evidence of civilisations
While the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is
deeply alarming, the virtual and temporary re-
moval of the canopy enabled by specially
equipped drones and planes is proving to be a
breakthrough for archaeologists. Using a tech-
nology called lidar, which stands for light detect-
ion and ranging, the system deploys a laser to
measure distances with precise accuracy and then
create immensely detailed high-resolution 3D
maps. The uses for such data, in mining, agri-
culture, soil science, conservation, seismology,
meteorology, driverless transportation and aug-
mented reality gaming, are legion.UK: The Home Office releases immigration
data, including Ukraine visa applications.
US: Meta, the owner of Facebook, holds its
virtual annual stockholder meeting.
Bempton Cliffs rise
a thousand feet
above the crashing
waves of the North
Sea. Known as
“seabird city”, the
dizzying chalk
ledges that form this RSPB reserve are
home to half a million nesting birds. Even
before you reach the viewing platform,
around the same time you smell the acrid
tang of the guano, you will hear their cries.
Not for them the melodious flutes of the
dawn chorus: a seabird colony is a swirling
cacophony. The growling of guillemots and
razorbills, the cackling of gannets and
fulmars, the shrieking of kittiwakes, the
laughter of puffins. When you nest in such
huge colonies, you have to shout loud to be
heard. jonathan tulloch
In 1950 the UK government announced an
immediate end to petrol rationing, which
had come into force in September 1939 at
the onset of the Second World War.
Michael Portillo,
pictured, Times Radio
broadcaster and TV
presenter, Great Coastal
Railway Journeys (2022),
former Conservative MP
and cabinet minister, 69;
Lord (Michael) Bates,
Conservative MP (1992-97), international
development minister (2016-19), 61; Baroness
(May) Blood, founding member (1996) of the
Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, 84;
Helena Bonham Carter, actress, The King’s
Speech (2010), 56; Zola Budd, world record-
breaking athlete, 5,000 metres (1985), 56;
Paul Collingwood, cricketer, England
(2003-11), 46; Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP
for Islington North, leader of the opposition
(2015-20), 73; Sir Clive Cowdery, insurance
entrepreneur and philanthropist, 59;
Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark, 54;
Cliff Drysdale, tennis player, 1965 US
championships singles finalist, 81; Howard
Goodall, composer, Eternal Light: A Requiem
(2008), and broadcaster, 64; Pam Grier,
actress, Jackie Brown (1997), 73; Lauryn Hill,
singer-songwriter, the Fugees, Ready Or Not
(1996), 47; Henry Holland, fashion designer,
39; Alan Hollinghurst, writer, The Line of
Beauty (2004, Booker prize), 68; Lenny
Kravitz, soul singer, Let Love Rule (1989), 58;
Kwasi Kwarteng, business, energy and
industrial strategy secretary, Conservative
MP for Spelthorne, 47; Jason Manford,
comedian, 41; Shantanu Narayen, chairman
and chief executive, Adobe Systems
(software company), 59; Stevie Nicks,
singer-songwriter, Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
(1977), 74; Mary Nightingale, newscaster,
ITV News, 59; Baroness (Fiona) Shackleton
of Belgravia, solicitor to the Duke of
Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex, 66;
Shi Zhengli, virologist, known as the “bat
woman” of Wuhan, 58; Lord (David) Stevens
of Ludgate, chairman, United News and
Media (1981-99), 86; Philip Michael Thomas,
actor, Miami Vice (1984-90), 73; Glenn
Turner, cricketer, New Zealand (1969-83),
75; James Wong, botanist and broadcaster,
Grow Your Own Drugs (2009-13), 41.
“The historical sense involves a perception, not
only of the pastness of the past, but of its
presence.” TS Eliot, poet, Tradition and the
Individual Talent (1919)
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