Johnson insisted the rules would not be “technically violated,” but acknowledged the country’s anger.
E the May holiday is only the latest of the violations to Covid-19 restrictions of which the Johnson administration has been accused. In recent days, another controversy had erupted over a Christmas party. Complicating the premier’s position is the fact that on May 20, 2020, the same day as the gathering in the garden, the government held a press conference reminding citizens that they could not meet with more than one person outside their family.
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Undersecretary Michael Ellis Ellis had stressed that even the event at the center of the latest controversy will end up under the lens of the independent investigation into the parties organized in institutional settings during the periods in which forms of lockdown were in force. At the same time Scotland Yard is conducting investigations. Ellis tried hard to defend the prime minister’s integrity and good faith from a courtroom where opposition MPs were clearly in the majority and also stood up. requests for resignation by individual exponents.
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Meanwhile, in two polls carried out in the last few hours, the majority of voters believe that Johnson should step down, as also the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon hopes. Many accusations of prejudice and facilitation were addressed to the Prime Minister, but above all the attacks for violating measures imposed on a population that paid heavily for those restrictions: deputies, including one of them in tears (Jim Shannon of the unionist party Dup), and the media recalled the cases of British who due of the lockdown could not stand by their loved ones as they died of coronavirus in hospital.
On May 20, 2020, given at the heart of the scandal, the strict “stay at home” indication, which allowed people to go out only to stock up on food, medicine and to exercise daily, had recently been relaxed, but it was only allowed to meet another person outside one’s family, as long as in an open public place and respecting a distance of two meters.
Johnson is also trying to resist this political and media storm keeping the bar to starboard as much as possible, although the continuous leaks of news on “forbidden” events bring out a branch within the party that is rowing against it and is always ready to trip. Martin Reynolds, the head of the Prime Minister’s personal secretariat, remains (for now) in his place, author of the incriminated email inviting a hundred officials and collaborators to the May 20 event in the Downing Street garden, complete with an indication to bring alcohol.
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