A government minister struggled to defend Boris Johnson from the fallout of Sue Gray’s report in a car crash interview on Newsnight.
Business minister Paul Scully repeatedly clashed with presenter Emma Barnett over the findings in Gray’s partial report, which blamed “failures of leadership and judgment” in No.10 and the Cabinet Office for the partygate scandal that has rocked his government.
Johnson’s allies have been at pains to stress the faults in the No.10 operation when asked about the report, and have pointed to the prime minister’s pledge to “fix it” as a way to defend him.
But Barnett did not accept that the problem lay solely with No.10 and not Johnson — citing Gray’s words that there was a “failure of leadership”.
Nevertheless, Scully continued to say that No.10 was a “big organisation” before attempting to move the conversation on to the separate investigation by the Met Police into 12 events at Downing Street.
“I know it’s really frustrating — it’s frustrating for me, it’s frustrating for you in the media,” he said.
“I’m not frustated!” Barnett interjected.
“We just know that parties were happening at 10 Downing Street — we know it now.
“The prime minister has accepted it, Sue Gray has said it, and we know that was happening during lockdown.
“How can the prime minister expect the people of this country to trust him when there were parties going on in Downing Street where the man lived and worked?”
Scully earned the biggest rebuke from Barnett when he tried to excuse rule breaking in No.10 by referencing the prime minister’s brush with Covid and the loss of his mother during the pandemic.
“Are you really going to use the fact that the prime minister nearly died, and other personal events in his life, to justify the fact that he either didn’t understand the rules or notice that people all around him where he lived and worked were partying?” she said.
“What I’m saying is if I came off my deathbed from Covid, I think I would have a pretty good handle on the need to abide by the rules,” Scully said.
“Clearly there was failing here, that’s why he’s apologised.
“We do need to make sure that we can move forward on to tackling the issues that people want to talk about.... we cannot spend two hours in parliament, the entirety of your programme talking about this while the government is doing many other things.”
“You don’t get to edit Newsnight,” Barnett shot back.
Barnett later won high praise from Twitter for her interviewing.