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Met Police reveal they’re fining 20 ‘Partygate’ people… but the guilty are kept in dark

Met Police reveal they're fining 20 'Partygate' people... but the guilty are kept in dark 2

The Partygate probe descended further into farce last night as it emerged Boris Johnson may not know for a week whether he is among the first to be fined. 

The Met yesterday announced it was issuing 20 fixed penalty notices over breaches of Covid rules at gatherings in Downing Street and Whitehall.

But in a bizarre move, officers made the number of fines public before informing those involved – who may not learn their fate for up to a week. 

Police also said that further fines could be issued in the coming weeks and months as they plough their way through a ‘significant amount of investigative material’.

Whitehall sources said the decision left ministers and officials in ‘purgatory’. 

The Criminal Records Office normally takes just four days to issue a fixed penalty notice, which is then posted out to the recipient. 

No10 was yesterday unable to say whether the PM has been fined, with the police not even revealing whether the events which met the ‘evidential threshold’ included those which he attended. 

The Partygate probe descended further into farce last night as it emerged Boris Johnson may not know for a week whether he is among the first to be fined. Pictured: Mr Johnson and staff pictured with wine in Downing Street garden in May 2020

The Partygate probe descended further into farce last night as it emerged Boris Johnson may not know for a week whether he is among the first to be fined. Pictured: Mr Johnson and staff pictured with wine in Downing Street garden in May 2020

Q&A 

Who has been fined? 

No one knows. 

Those fined for lesser offences such as Covid breaches or minor cases of speeding, are not usually named.

However during the pandemic, forces regularly provided briefings about lockdown breaches which gave the number of party attendees, dates and street locations. 

What’s the punishment? 

At the start of the pandemic the fine was £100 for breaking the ‘rule of six’, which later increased to £200. 

The penalty doubled for each repeat offence, up to a maximum of £3,200. 

Organisers of parties faced fines of up to £10,000.

Anyone who does not pay the fine faces possible prosecution for breaching the coronavirus regulations, at which point their name would become public. 

Will anyone go to jail? 

These are summary only offences, which do not carry a prison sentence. 

They are punishable by fines, which are not recorded on the Police National Computer and do not involve getting a criminal record. 

Who’s leading the police probe? 

Scotland Yard’s Special Enquiry Team, known as the ‘Celebrity Squad’.

It investigates sensitive and confidential cases involving ‘high profile subjects and politically exposed persons’. 

The team is led by Met Commander Catherine Roper. 

How long will it drag on for? 

It could be months given the number of parties under investigation. In its statement the Met made clear that its inquiries were continuing and there could still be more fines issued, given more than 100 questionnaires have gone out. 

Which events are they? 

Scotland Yard has refused to give details, but 12 are under investigation. 

They are thought to include May 20, 2020 when Mr Johnson’s private secretary emailed 100 Downing Street staff inviting them to ‘bring your own booze’ to a No10 garden party. 

Downing Street also refused to say whether Mr Johnson now accepts the law was broken – something he has denied.

His official spokesman said: ‘I think the Met themselves have set out where they are in this process. I’m not going to get beyond that process. It’s for the Met to make that judgment rather than the Prime Minister.’ 

The spokesman also insisted that the PM did not deliberately misled Parliament when he repeatedly reassured MPs that no rules had been broken. 

‘The PM has apologised to the House already,’ he said. 

‘He has said he is sorry for the way things have been handled. At all times he set out his understanding of events at the time.’ 

The decision by the police to make an interim statement on their inquiry caused frustration among ministers, who had expected the entire investigation to be completed by now. 

A Whitehall source told the Daily Mail: ‘It is entirely unsatisfactory. They seem to have gone public about fines without even telling the people involved, leaving them in purgatory.’ 

Another source said it was thought the police had targeted the ‘easy’ cases where evidence of rule-breaking was clear or where the individuals had admitted wrongdoing.

Mr Johnson has repeatedly insisted he did nothing wrong. 

But the police are investigating a number of events which he attended, including the notorious ‘bring your own booze’ party in the No 10 garden in May 2020, when social mixing was illegal. 

The Cabinet Office confimed that the report by Whitehall ethics chief Sue Gray will not be published until the police probe is finished, meaning the row could rumble on for months.

Tory MP Peter Bone said the investigation was ‘bad for the country’. 

‘Clearly some people in No10 broke the law and it is right that they are dealt with in the same way anyone else would be,’ he said.

‘But I do find it very strange that this investigation is dragging on for so long, and appears to be almost endless. A fixed-penalty notice is basically equivalent to a parking ticket, and the length of time this is taking to investigate is extraordinary.

‘It is obviously bad for the Government and the PM to have this hanging over them, but it is also bad for the country. I do hope it is not being dragged out for political reasons by people who are opposed to the Prime Minister and is not tied up in some way with the appointment of a new Met Commissioner. That would be completely unacceptable.’

Former Tory chief whip Mark Harper suggested law-breaking civil servants or special advisers would have to be sacked. 

Second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office Sue Gray walks along Whitehall after appearing at the Welsh affairs committee in Parliament in March 2022

Second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office Sue Gray walks along Whitehall after appearing at the Welsh affairs committee in Parliament in March 2022

In a tweet, he posted a screenshot of the Civil Service Code, highlighting a passage saying they must ‘comply with the law’. 

But No10 declined to say whether the PM considered breaking Covid laws to be a resigning matter.

Staff will not be asked if they have been fined unless the information is required for security vetting. 

Downing Street said ‘normal disciplinary processes’ would be applied in cases where officials misbehaved. 

No10 has said it will confirm if the PM, pictured with wife Carrie Johnson, is eventually fined, and yesterday said it would also reveal whether any action is taken against Cabinet Secretary Simon Case

No10 has said it will confirm if the PM, pictured with wife Carrie Johnson, is eventually fined, and yesterday said it would also reveal whether any action is taken against Cabinet Secretary Simon Case

No10 has said it will confirm if the PM is eventually fined, and yesterday said it would also reveal whether any action is taken against Cabinet Secretary Simon Case.

Hannah Brady, spokesman for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said the PM’s team had ‘regularly and blatantly’ broken ‘the same rules that families across the country stuck with even when they suffered terribly as a consequence’. 

She added: ‘It’s crystal clear now that whilst the British public rose to the challenge of making enormous sacrifices to protect their loved ones and their communities, those at 10 Downing Street failed.’

Education minister Will Quince earlier said the gatherings ‘shouldn’t have happened’. 

He said questions over whether Mr Johnson should resign if fined were ‘hypothetical’. 

Met’s costly bureaucratic monster that’s fast spinning out of control  

By Guy Adams  

When the Metropolitan Police fined revellers at a lockdown-breaking house party in Mayfair last spring, top brass were shouting about it from the proverbial rooftops.

Within hours, a press release announced that 34 people had been discovered at an address on Dover Street, opposite the Ritz, at 00.52 on the morning of Sunday April 11.

They’d each got a fixed penalty notice, it revealed, while ‘the organiser was reported for a £10,000 fine’. 

A rather sanctimonious comment from the Superintendent accused miscreants of ‘jeopardising the progress that has been made by the majority of people who have followed the rules’.

 Fast forward almost 12 months and London’s Covid cops seem oddly reluctant to trumpet similar achievements. 

Yesterday’s announcement that 20 fixed penalty notices have been issued to subjects of the Partygate investigation failed to contain even the most basic information about when or where the offences took place. 

The amount of the fines was also kept secret. 

When the Metropolitan Police fined revellers at a lockdown-breaking house party in Mayfair last spring, top brass were shouting about it from the proverbial rooftops

When the Metropolitan Police fined revellers at a lockdown-breaking house party in Mayfair last spring, top brass were shouting about it from the proverbial rooftops

There was no crowing quotation to shoehorn into news reports and (unlike the previous announcements) no tab on the Press release to click to share details via social media. 

Released on the morning of Prince Philip’s memorial service – a good day, a cynic might say, to ‘bury’ news – the PR announcement seemed designed to generate as little interest as possible. 

Which, given the already-contentious history of the Partygate probe, may very well have been the point. 

It’s now 64 days since the ill-fated Dame Cressida Dick performed a clattering U-turn, telling the London Assembly that – having spent weeks insisting the Met would never ‘retroactively’ investigate Covid breaches – her scandal-ridden police force now intended to do precisely that. 

Ever since, the probe has been mired in entirely predictable controversy. 

Dame Cressida established Operation Hillman, an investigation by Scotland Yard’s Special Enquiry Team, to look at ‘a number’ of events at Downing Street and Whitehall that may have involved ‘the most serious and flagrant type of breach’ of lockdown regulations. 

All of which was highly contentious, not least since it forced civil servant Sue Gray to make only ‘minimal references’ to those events in her long-awaited report, which was due to be published days later. 

Eight senior officers were promptly assigned to the Special Enquiry Team, which is known as the ‘Celebrity Squad’ and was formed about 20 years ago to ‘investigate sensitive and confidential inquiries… involving high-profile subjects and politically exposed persons’.

 In charge was one Commander Catherine Roper. 

She has what one might call a mixed track record of handling delicate policing operations, having last year decided that officers under her control ought to break up a vigil on Clapham Common to Sarah Everard – a woman raped and murdered by a serving Met officer – due to Covid rules.

A couple of weeks ago, the High Court ruled that the move had breached the human rights of the organisers. 

Roper’s team has grown considerably in size in the nine weeks since it was formed, though the Met refuses to say exactly how many officers are working on the inquiry.

What no one can possibly dispute, however, is that Operation Hillman will chew up a huge amount of public money and police resources after a record year for teenage killings in the capital, with 30 deaths in 2021. 

The force is also battling an epidemic of knife crime and violence against women and girls, with sexual offences up 38 per cent in the year to February compared to the previous 12 months. 

Perhaps not helping things on the cost front are the tactics of investigating officers.

The 20 whose fines were announced yesterday are not believed to have offered any defence

The 20 whose fines were announced yesterday are not believed to have offered any defence

Despite being in possession of Gray’s purportedly forensic report – along with 500 documents and 300 CCTV images relating to the 12 events in question – their method of investigation is extraordinarily labour-intensive.

It involves emailing potential suspects from Downing Street and the Civil Service a questionnaire asking about a dozen questions including (according to a copy leaked to ITV) ‘did you participate in a gathering?’, ‘what was the purpose of your participation?’ and ‘did you interact with, or undertake any activity with, other persons present?’ 

Recipients are invited to offer a ‘reasonable excuse’ as to why they shouldn’t be sanctioned. 

The 20 whose fines were announced yesterday are not believed to have offered any defence. 

They will learn of their fate in the coming days, when a fixed-penalty notice drops onto their doormat. 

Some suspects may then be invited to attend an interview, a part of the process that didn’t even get underway until last week. 

And on most occasions when questionnaires are sent back to detectives or they complete an interview, fresh names are discovered who need to be sent their own questionnaire. 

More than 100 have so far been sent out. 

‘The whole thing has created a bureaucratic monster,’ is how one Downing Street expert puts it. 

‘People are getting these weird emails asking why they had a glass of wine one evening a year ago. If they deny wrongdoing, for example by saying they were discussing work with colleagues at their desks, the police then have to go off and try to reconcile their response with that of the colleagues.’ 

That may be bad news for the Government, adds the insider. ‘There’s now every sign that this thing will drag on for months, with a new batch of fines announced every few weeks. Boris wants it over and done with. The last thing he wants is for it to drag on later in the year, especially if bad news stories such as the cost-of-living crisis overtake the war in Ukraine as the top story.’ 

The expectation when Operation Hillman launched was that the first fines would be sent by the end of February and the whole thing ought to last no more than a year.

Now the timeframe is anyone’s guess. 

Meanwhile, the imminent departure of Dame Cressida has added to the sense of drift. 

Her caretaker replacement, Sir Stephen House hardly inspires confidence.

Meanwhile, the imminent departure of Dame Cressida Dick, pictured attending the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh, has added to the sense of drift

Meanwhile, the imminent departure of Dame Cressida Dick, pictured attending the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh, has added to the sense of drift

Currently Dame Cressida’s second in command, he’s best known as the chief constable of Police Scotland who was dogged by controversy including the deaths of Lamara Bell and John Yuill who languished injured and dying in their car for three days following a crash on the M9 in 2015. 

As to the overall cost, one modern precedent, the Blair-era ‘cash for honours’ probe, took 16 months and ate up £1.4million.

For that sort of outlay to be even remotely justified, Operation Hillman needs to see large numbers of high-profile rule-breakers fined. 

But that puts detectives in a bind: For if just one of those fines is successfully challenged in court, the whole operation will be an expensive PR disaster.

Given how much is therefore at stake, it’s perhaps no wonder that the perennially-troubled force is no longer shouting from the rooftops about Covid probes. 

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