
Behind the headlines
Boris is still the “least bad option” for the Tories
The Downing Street party scandal started with reports of a few small “gatherings” and a glass of wine or two, says Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Now it turns out that over lockdown government was “a non-stop, booze-fuelled, funkadelic, superspreading knees-up”. This includes two parties on the eve of Prince Philip’s socially distanced funeral, for which No 10 has had to apologise directly to Buckingham Palace. Depressingly, the current spin is that the May 2020 party Johnson attended is unlikely to be judged as illegal by Sue Gray, the civil servant investigating. No matter: the public have long since made up their mind that Johnson is sleazy, selfish and entitled. Such is the PM’s predicament, “regime change” might not be far away.