NEWS 5
28 May 2022 THE WEEK...and how they were covered
What next?
The scale of the rule-breaking in Downing Street almost defies belief, said Jessica Elgot in
The Guardian. The events involved the same people who signed off those public-information
pictures of exhausted nurses with the slogan: “Look her in the eyes and tell her you never bend
the rules.” Yet there they all were, shamelessly flouting their own restrictions: invites to “bring
your own booze” to the No. 10 garden; “wine-time Fridays”; raucous karaoke; people being
sick in offices; WhatsApp messages joking about “time to open the Covid secure bar”.
Gray’s report was “not particularly surprising” given what we already knew, said Isabel
Hardman in The Spectator. But it will have made for “grim reading” in No. 10, not just because
of the added level of detail it offers about some of the more egregious events, but also because
it makes it clear that senior staff knew they were breaking the rules. The report quotes from
a WhatsApp message to the former No. 10 principal secretary, Martin Reynolds (known in the
press as “Party Marty”), warning him that the “BYOB” bash in May 2020 was a risky idea. At
the time, gatherings of two or more people indoors and more than six outdoors were banned.
After the event, Reynolds joked in a message to a colleague that they appeared to have “got
away” with it. A consolation for Johnson is that Gray did acknowledge that “progress” had
been made in addressing the concerns she had raised in her interim report in January.
Johnson could wriggle “out of the grasp of his persecutors” again, said Sean O’Grady on
The Independent. The Partygate story has dragged on for so long that it has lost some of its
impact. “The constant tactic of buying time, waiting for this, waiting for that, looking for other
distractions to turn up (such as a European war)... slinging mud around and generally hoping
for the best” seems to have paid off. The delay has worked to the PM’s advantage, agreed Katy
Balls in The Guardian. Had the report come out in January, it might have been “the final nail in
the coffin” for Johnson. But since then, he has shaken up No. 10 and wooed his MPs, who are
mostly willing to stick with him, not least because there’s still no “obvious replacement” for him.
What the commentators said
The PM isn’t out of the
woods yet, says The Times.
He still faces a probe by
the Commons privileges
committee into whether
he lied to MPs when he
insisted he hadn’t broken
any lockdown laws, and
was unaware of any parties.
Under the ministerial code,
those found to have
deliberately misled Parliament
are expected to resign.Another crunch point for
Johnson will come on 23
June, when the Tories could
potentially face a couple of
damaging by-election defeats.
The party is currently trailing
the Liberal Democrats in the
battle for the seat of Tiverton
and Honiton; and in the “red
wall” seat of Wakefield the
Tories are facing a resurgent
Labour Party.What next?
“All my life, the widely shared assumption has been that there will always be food to buy –
albeit at a price,” said Will Hutton in The Observer. Suddenly, Russia’s blockade of Ukraine has
changed all that. “Only a fraction” of Ukraine’s crucial harvests can find their way into global
markets via road or ports in Romania. Grain prices are up 59% this year; insurance costs for
ships sailing in the Black Sea are prohibitive; and warnings of a “food apocalypse” grow louder
daily. Putin’s efforts to “starve the whole world into submitting to his will” are already causing
global convulsions, said Sean O’Grady on The Independent. Higher food prices have contributed
to riots in Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Peru in recent months, and Ukraine’s status as a supplier of
staples to much of the developing world means similar scenes could be replicated elsewhere.
The West has a choice. It can let Russia “starve the poor of Africa and the Middle East”, or it
can do the right thing, and mobilise a “vast armada” of vessels to break Putin’s blockade.
That wouldn’t be easy, said Lawrence Freedman in The New Statesman. Ukrainian mines laid to
deter Russian naval attacks would need clearing. And any such mission would need the backing
of Turkey (which controls access to the Black Sea) and Nato, which seems to view such a move
as “unduly provocative”. Rightly so, said Jamie Dettmer on Politico. Involving allied warships
could lead to a direct confrontation between Russian and Nato forces – precisely the fear that
led the West to reject calls for a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine. With millions at risk of starvation,
the moral imperative to find a solution is clear, said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph. And
there are “practical reasons” to keep food flowing, too. Opinion on Putin’s war outside the
West is far from settled, and populations hit by food shortages may attribute them to sanctions
imposed on Russia. It would be a “Pyrrhic victory” indeed were the West to help Ukraine win
the war – only to be blamed by the rest of the world for a “terrible surge in human suffering”.
What the commentators said
Lithuania has mooted a
plan for a “coalition of the
willing” to break Russia’s
blockade and create a
“protective corridor”
from Ukraine’s coast to
the Bosphorus, The Daily
Telegraph reports. Foreign
Secretary Liz Truss has held
talks over the proposal, but
is reportedly reluctant to
send UK warships to help.The World Bank has made
an extra $12bn available
to tackle food insecurity,
bringing the total in the
next 15 months to $30bn.
India, the world’s second-
largest wheat producer, has
blocked exports of the crop
in the wake of a crippling
heatwave there.An alarming analysis published last week suggested that obese
people will outnumber people of healthy weight in Britain by the
end of the decade unless the state intervenes. Whether such
meaningful action will be forthcoming is hard to tell. Boris Johnson used to be a vocal opponent of
anything that smacked of nannying by the state. In 2006, he famously sided with mothers who passed
pies to pupils through school railings in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, in protest at their school’s
healthy eating policy. “I say let people eat what they like,” he declared. But after his Covid health
scare in 2020, Johnson dramatically changed his tune, pledging an urgent new anti-obesity strategy.
Now, though, he has been accused of doing another U-turn following the decision to delay a ban on
multibuy deals for junk food and pre-watershed TV advertising. It seems that the Government can’t
quite decide where it stands on the spectrum between paternalism and libertarianism.
Its instincts on this front will be further tested in the weeks ahead when it publishes a white paper
setting out planned reforms of our gambling laws. It’s the first formal review of the 2005 Gambling
Act, which radically liberalised betting in this country and which many now believe needs to be
overhauled for an age when betting adverts have become all-pervasive and smartphones can act
as 24-hour casinos. Will ministers be any more effective at reining in the country’s
gambling habits than they have been at shrinking the nation’s waistline?THE WEEK
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