Downing Street Partygate affair: Metropolitan Police must not hide photographs from public view – Scotsman comment

As ‘state secrets’ go, it would be a particularly petty, shoddy and grubby one.

Boris Johnson tried to hide the Downing Street parties from the public. The police must not do the same (Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

After the UK Cabinet Office handed over more than 300 photographs to the Metropolitan Police as part of the Partygate investigation, it has now asked whether the images will be made public.

Apparently, civil servants expect they will not be as the identities of people given fixed-penalty notices are not usually disclosed by the police. There is also a convention, within Whitehall at least, that junior civil servants are not publicly identified.

However, law-breaking by those at the heart of government is hardly a ‘usual’ event and anyone guilty of it should not be able to rely on a convention being upgraded to the status of an unbreakable rule.

Furthermore, the UK government’s concern about the publication of photographs is almost certainly less to do with safeguarding hapless junior staff than with protecting more senior figures and the politicians, chief among them Boris Johnson.

Heaven forbid that voters should be allowed to see even a glimpse of what actually went on behind the closed doors of Downing Street and elsewhere in Whitehall – sanctioned by a Prime Minister who still insists he didn’t recognise a “bring your own booze” event as the party that it obviously was – while the rest of the country solemnly followed the lockdown rules.

If the Metropolitan Police decides to keep these photographs permanently under wraps, they would be taking a deeply political decision and allowing themselves to be drawn into Johnson’s dishonest and dishonourable attempts to cover up the truth.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers.

If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.