10 months ago
30
The former PM addressed Partygate, ‘letting it rip’ and ‘eat out to help out’ in his second day of evidence
Boris Johnson has continued to defend his handling of the pandemic on his second day of giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. He expressed surprise that scientists were not consulted about the “eat out to help out” scheme, sought to justify having said older people should “accept their fate”, and claimed that characterisations of the Partygate scandal were a “travesty of the truth”.
We should have thought about how No 10 parties would look, Johnson told colleagues
Johnson worried about the public perception of parties in Downing Street after the first stories broke about the scandal, messages shown to the inquiry revealed. In December 2021 the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, recused himself from a Partygate inquiry after it emerged that one of the parties was hosted in his office. In a message to Case, Johnson said: “I am really sorry this thing is now causing you any kind of grief at all. The whole business is insane. We will get through it and come out on top.”
