“Partygate” burdens government
Four Johnson confidants vacate their posts
2/3/2022, 11:16 p.m
It’s getting lonely around Boris Johnson. Four of the British Prime Minister’s close associates are resigning. The “Partygate” affair plays a role in three of the terminations.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is facing increasing pressure, has lost four key employees. The government announced in the evening that it had accepted the resignations of Johnson’s chief of staff, Martin Reynolds, and chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield. Johnson’s communications director, Jack Doyle, and Downing Street policy director, Munira Mirza, had previously announced that they would be stepping down.
Bureau chief Reynolds and communications chief Doyle are implicated in the “Partygate” affair surrounding celebrations at the seat of government in 2020, which are currently being investigated by the police for possible violations of the Corona rules. In May 2020, Reynolds invited around a hundred employees to a “drink by far” in the garden of the office.
Doyle had attended at least one of the controversial Downing Street lockdown parties. According to a report in the Daily Mail newspaper, Doyle said the past few weeks had “taken a terrible toll on his family life.” Rosenfield, who also resigned, took over as chief of staff about a year ago. Johnson thanked Reynolds and Rosenfield for their “important contribution” to the work of the government, according to a Downing Street spokesman. They remain in office until their successor has been decided.
“Signal that the bunker is collapsing”
Policy Department head Mirza cited Johnson’s “infamous” attack on Labor leader Keir Starmer earlier in the week as the reason for her resignation. Johnson accused the opposition leader in Parliament on Monday of personally failing to prosecute sex offender Jimmy Savile as chief prosecutor from 2008 to 2013.
This conspiracy theory, which is widespread in right-wing extremist circles, is widely regarded as disproved. Starmer then accused Johnson of “parroting the conspiracy theories of violent fascists in order to score politically cheaply”. After the death of the former star presenter Jimmy Savile in 2011, it became known that he had abused hundreds of children and adults for around 40 years without being prosecuted.
Johnson was also heavily criticized from within his own ranks for his statements and tried to back down on Wednesday. Mirza criticized that an apology from Johnson was still pending. “There was no fair or reasonable basis for that allegation,” she wrote in her resignation letter, according to a report by Spectator magazine.
Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings, who is now an outspoken opponent of the prime minister, said Mirza’s resignation was an “unmistakable signal that the bunker is collapsing”.