Labour rips into ‘dysfunctional’ Downing Street as civil servant takes over Christmas party probe

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox

Get our free View from Westminster email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Boris Johnson’s government is “completely dysfunctional”, Labour said on Saturday as a top civil servant took over the probe into rule-breaking Christmas parties following the latest allegation.

Chris Bryant, chair of the House of Commons committee on standards, was speaking after cabinet secretary Simon Case stepped down from the investigation over claims he himself had attended a lockdown-breaching drinks event last December.

The Labour MP said the situation over the parties in Whitehall was “farcical”, adding: “It feels a bit like Downing Street is completely dysfunctional. Nobody seems to know what’s going on.”

Mr Johnson resisted demands for the inquiry to be handed over to an external investigator, instead appointing Whitehall mandarin Sue Gray to complete the probe. It was unclear how soon she will be able to issue a report.

The announcement that Mr Case was “recusing” himself from the inquiry came hours after The Independent published claims from Whitehall officials that Mr Case was present at an impromptu Christmas event at the Cabinet Office’s 70 Whitehall HQ while indoor mixing was still banned under Covid rules.

The report made his position at the head of the inquiry untenable, with demands for his removal from Labour and the Scottish National Party.

Mr Bryant urged Ms Gray to hand any evidence of lawbreaking she found over to the police.

He added: “If the rules are broken ... if they were broken in any other line of work, the police would be investigating and I don’t know why the police aren’t investigating this situation.”

He said: “In the end, the final analysis has to be done by a completely independent person. I think that that should be the police.”

Ms Gray, who is second permanent secretary at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, was previously director-general of propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office from 2012 to 2018, and is seen as a figure who would not pull any punches in an inquiry.

She oversaw the Plebgate inquiry in 2012 after former chief whip Andrew Mitchell was accused of calling a policeman a “pleb” at the Downing Street gates, and was once described as “deputy God” by then Labour MP Paul Flynn in a meeting of Parliament’s Public Administration Committee the same year.

Former Tory MP and Cabinet office minister Oliver Letwin is reported to have said of Ms Gray: “It took me precisely two years before I realised who it is that runs Britain. Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray, the head of ethics or something in the Cabinet Office. Unless she agrees, things just don’t happen.”

She is also part of the panel deciding who will be next chair of the media regulator Ofcom.