“So, this party,” asked my friend in San Francisco, “were there hookers?”
“Good heavens, no, it was in Downing Street!”
“What was it, then? Lines of coke?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“So, where’s the scandal?”
“Well, there was, er, a birthday cake — though, apparently, it never actually left its box.”
“Are you being serious? You guys want Boris to resign over a cake?”
“Well, when you put it like that, yes, I suppose some people do.”
There are times when British politics can feel unutterably small. We were the first country to administer a vaccine, the first country to come fully out of lockdown, and the first country to offer training and materiel to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky cheerfully hails Boris Johnson as his chief ally. Yet the consensus of our commentators and politicians is that uneaten cake is the chief issue before the nation.
In June 2020, Britain was in lockdown. The rules forbade social gatherings. People were allowed to meet outside their families only for humanitarian reasons, to buy essential goods, or to do work that they could not do at home. The prime minister was in this last category, as were most of his staff.
On June 19, having recently returned from hospital after his own bout with COVID, Johnson was working through some papers in the Cabinet Room. It was his birthday, and some Downing Street employees came in to sing him “Happy Birthday.” The whole episode lasted nine minutes.
Last week, the police issued the prime minister a fine for breaking lockdown rules. They also fined the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, who was in the room at the time because he was waiting for the next meeting.
It seems likely that there will be further fines. If being in the same room as a cake is now deemed to be a breach of a lockdown, then there will have been numerous infractions at No. 10, as, indeed, at almost any address in Britain.
The fines have nonetheless prompted a hysterical campaign for Johnson to resign. Ministers go on air to discuss the war or the cost of living crisis but instead find furious broadcasters sloganizing at them. “Lawmakers shouldn’t be lawbreakers!” “One rule for you and one rule for the rest of us!”
This second charge is especially fatuous. If it is true that politicians are treated differently. It is true in precisely the opposite way from that which people usually mean. It is literally unimaginable that the police would investigate a fixed penalty notice case after a two-year interval in any other circumstance. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that any other group of workers would have been fined for mixing while already in their office where they have been mixing anyway.
In June 2020, there were plenty of examples of nurses doing TikTok dances and the like. It never occurred to anyone to prosecute them, and for good reason. The rule against socializing was intended to slow the spread of the infection. People who had already been working under the same roof were never meant to be the targets.
If you think I am rationalizing after the event, consider the following report, which appeared in the London Times the day after the supposed crime:
“Boris Johnson celebrated his 56th birthday yesterday with a small gathering in the cabinet room. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, and a group of aides sang him Happy Birthday before they tucked into a Union Jack cake.”
Does that sound like some dodgy speakeasy that they were trying to keep secret? Did it cause uproar when it was reported? Of course not. You know why? Because no one thought it was remotely improper.
Yet, for some reason, the country has since edited its collective memory. People who I can remember having drinks outside in their yards in June 2020 have now genuinely convinced themselves that they never left their homes. They are starting to suspect, correctly, that the lockdown was too long and too harsh, and retrospectively blaming the man who was its public face offers them a kind of catharsis.
The prime minister’s supporters argue that the anger against him is disproportionate and that it would be crazy to switch leaders during a war. This strikes me as a weak argument. Prime ministers were ousted between elections during both world wars, as well as the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those were wars in which Britain was an active combatant.
No, the better defense of Johnson is the one that no one dares make because no one wants to stand in the path of a lynch mob. But here goes: He did nothing seriously wrong.
