The man and the parties that made a mockery of millions of people

Wine, gin, sausage rolls and an invite to "bring your own booze". This was the scene at 10 Downing Street amid the strict lockdown of May 20, 2020. Boris Johnson spent 25 minutes at the party. He says he didn't realise it was one.

Some 140 miles away in Newport, Nicola Mincher was grieving the loss of her husband Raza. Just a few weeks before the party, Raza had died after a month in intensive care fighting Covid, his organs slowly failing. The 53-year-old dad-of-two was treated side by side with his brother Ghulam, who died hours later of the same deadly virus.

Nicola was only able to visit her husband once in hospital. Raza was unconscious as she held his hand. He died minutes after she arrived. It still haunts Nicola every day that she spent so little of his final weeks with him, but she respected lockdown. She had seen what Covid could do.

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Nicola was far from alone. Dean Burnett's abiding memory of spring 2020 is saying goodbye to his dying father on a phone call; for Dr Saleyha Ahsan it's trying not to pass out in full PPE while saving lives; for nurse Leanne Lewis it's seeing her colleagues die; while for Carol Richards it's being fined for waving at her mum through a care home window.

The Prime Minister has made a mockery of all those people and countless others. During a pandemic which has killed 174,233 across the UK including 9,176 in Wales, his government has been accused of 14 rule-breaking parties. Johnson reportedly told Scotland's Tory leader this week that he couldn’t guarantee there isn’t more to come out. And with each new report, Nicola feels more "disgusted". She cannot bring herself to say the Prime Minister's name or look at her television when he appears.

Dean, a neuroscientist and author whose 58-year-old Port Talbot dad died in April 2020, says he's been so angry he became numb. "You are so angry that it pushes you beyond. It's like stretching an elastic band so far that it goes too floppy," he said.

It's a scandal that threatens not just to bring down a Prime Minister but damage the Conservative Party for years. Professor Paul Whiteley, of the University Essex, this week compared it to the Profumo affair that brought down the Tory government of 1963. Savanta ComRes polling shows two thirds think Johnson should stand down. The latest YouGov poll gives Labour a 10-point lead. In the New Statesman, Ben Walker argued that the level of anger in marginal seats would turn that Labour lead into a landslide.

The Government has admitted some of the gatherings and denied others. Johnson has attended some and claimed ignorance of others. He has used words such as "work meeting" to defend an event which featured wine, cheese and his wife Carrie. He has apologised for one party while insisting he thought he was actually at a "work event". His spokeswoman Allegra Stratton lost her job for joking about one of the parties, but he believes he can continue as PM after attending one.

For Johnson personally, it threatens to be one disaster too far. His ability to turn catastrophes into votes with a goofy smile and a wacky pair of shorts has defied convention throughout his career. Who else has become Prime Minister after secretly discussing a plan to beat up a journalist? Or describing working-class men as "likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless”?

Now though his smirk has become the sign he's lying. Radio presenter James O'Brien of LBC described it as "the little Benny Hill type twitching of the upper lip"like the one he gave when asked if he'd attended a party in lockdown in his own back garden. Johnson's own Tory MPs use phrases like " a matter of time " and "managed exit". But if he loses the ability to make people laugh because all they see is a man who made fools of them, it won't just be his job as Prime Minister he has to worry about but what options he has afterwards as well.

But right now this is about more than just one man. A funeral officer told LBC radio on Friday that he felt like "an idiot" for having stopped crying family members for attending cremations when there were too many people.

"I feel like an idiot... I could have been more lenient. If we're all standing here trying to follow the rules and he can't even follow the rules he's put out himself," he said.

If this shatters not just the public's faith in the government but the willingness of people in positions of authority to enforce rules, how deep and long-lasting will the damage prove? In total, there were 11,884 fines for breaches of lockdown rules issued in Wales and 105,329 in England. Some 366 of them - including three in Wales - related to gatherings of more than 30 people. A further 3,440 in England and 501 in Wales were for groups of more than 15.

The Metropolitan Police appears, so far, unlikely to apply the same rigour to determining whether there were similar breaches in the heart of government. We're told the Met will only investigate if senior civil servant Sue Gray's inquiry finds evidence of criminality. We're also told by the Times that she has not found sufficient evidence of criminality to refer the incidents to the police.

As ITV's Paul Brand put it: "The many thousands of people fined for breaching Covid rules may wish they could only have asked a close colleague to investigate them before needing to involve the police."

Few will forgive or forget partygate. Let's look at why, starting with a timeline of the reported events:

'They don't live in our world'

Nicola remembers her husband Raza being "really excited" for the birth of his second grandchild, which was only a few months away when he fell ill with Covid.

Raza, who managed a Range warehouse in Bristol, and his brother Ghulam, a taxi driver, were treated in adjoining beds at the Royal Gwent Hospital, where they died on April 22, 2020.

The day Raza was taken to hospital, he told Nicola where she could find their insurance papers in case he didn't come back. "I was just gobsmacked," she said. "I think he knew."

That was to be Nicola's last conversation with the man she described as her soulmate. While in hospital Raza called their son Connor, 25, who offered to bring a toothbrush in. Raza replied: "Don't worry about that son. Just do me a favour. Look after your mum for me."

Raza was put on a ventilator soon afterwards and his condition deteriorated over the next month. Nicola was not allowed to visit until the day he died, when she got a call from the hospital at 2.30am.

"They said they would try to keep him alive until I got there. I put PPE [personal protective equipment] on and the doctors let me sit at his bedside and hold his hand. All the doctors were around his bed with me. For five minutes he was there, and then he passed.

"That night I had to catch a taxi home. I couldn't go near my sons. I had to leave my clothes outside in a black bag and have a shower and then I just sat there. I couldn't do anything. It still gives me nightmares every day that I had to ring my sons and say 'dad's passed' and I couldn't even hug them."

Only five people attended the funeral because of restrictions. For Nicola, the loneliness since Raza's death has been "horrific". When she found out Downing Street parties had taken place over Christmas 2020, while she was limiting contact with her family as she mourned her husband, she was "gobsmacked".

"I was absolutely disgusted," said the 52-year-old. "It's one rule for them and another for the little people. They don't live in our world. They do whatever they want."

Nicola, who cannot bring herself to say the name of the Prime Minister, said: "The speech he's made about the parties was just excuses. I don't know anyone who brings their own bottle to a work meeting. He should have resigned a long time ago. I can't even watch him on television."

Her anger is not limited to the parties. She calls Johnson's time in office "disaster after disaster" and believes he should have done far more to control the spread of Covid early in the pandemic, from border control to public messaging.

'One rule for them'

"One rule for them" is a phrase which has been hard to escape in the shockwaves of partygate. Johnson said he joined the May 20 garden event because he wanted to thank his staff for their hard work fighting Covid, but no one has worked harder than NHS employees during the pandemic. And the responses of many of them to this scandal have been damning.

Dr Saleyha Ahsan, who lost her father to Covid, was working at Bangor Hospital in the early months of the crisis. "And what was I doing in May 2020?" she said. "I was dressed in PPE. Yeah, the weather was warm. I was sweating, trying not to pass out every time I went into the contamination room to see a patient who had Covid in our full PPE. We weren't going out in the evenings to gather as colleagues to have drinks."

Bridgend nurse Leanne Lewis was working in acute Covid wards in May 2020. She told WalesOnline her team was "at absolute breaking point", coming home each night "in tears, stressed and frightened".

On one weekend that month, two of Leanne's colleagues died with Covid within hours of each other. “It wasn’t unusual," she said. "We were hearing it more and more. I had friends whose parents had also died with the virus. These were not elderly or ill people. It was absolutely terrifying - and we were people who were sticking to the rules. I’m in disbelief that this [Downing Street party] was happening at that time. Words fail me."

Dean Burnett says his father Peter, from Port Talbot, was a man who only lived to 58 but had 600 years' worth of stories, "a big-hearted man who always looked after those around him". Peter, a property developer, spent around a fortnight in hospital before dying of Covid on April 20, 2020.

Unable to visit due to restrictions, Dean remembers sitting in his pyjamas in his kitchen when he got a call from the hospital. He was given 20 minutes' notice for a final call to his father. "My final words to him were said over a phone, held to his unconscious ear by a consultant. It was as brutal as you imagine. I told him, 'You did a good job.'"

As reports of Downing Street parties have mounted, Dean increasingly struggles to feel anything but "numbness". He added: "You are so angry that it pushes you beyond. It's like stretching an elastic band so far that it goes too floppy."

The "most jarring" thing for Dean was when the Prime Minister defended Dominic Cummings' lockdown-breaking trip to Barnard Castle in March 2020.

"Covid had killed someone very close to me and the idea of inflicting it on someone else by not obeying the rules was unimaginable to me," he said. "I was emotionally distraught and I still had to look after my kids, but because of lockdown there was no one to rally round like they would normally when you lose someone. To then hear Boris Johnson say Cummings did what any good parent would do, it was a massive slap in the face to all parents across the country who had been following the rules."

"One rule for them" may also be the sentiment of the many people fined for Covid breaches. A woman in Hackney was fined £12,000 after throwing a birthday party on the day of Prince Phillip's funeral. The day earlier, Downing Street staff had reportedly brought a suitcase full of wine into a No 10 garden party.

Then there was the fine handed to Bridgend couple David and Carol Richards in January 2021, the month after Christmas parties in Downing Street. The couple travelled 20 minutes to see Carol's 94-year-old mother Decima in a Porthcawl care home, with the permission of care staff. They spoke to her through the window of her ground-floor room before returning home. Police issued a £60 fine which was later cancelled.

It is easy to forget the backlash in the early stages of the pandemic against incidents which now pale in comparison to the parties at Downing Street. In March 2020, Stephen Kinnock, the MP for Aberavon, posted a picture of himself on a chair outside his parents’ London home on his dad's birthday. Mr Kinnock, who was sitting metres from his parents, earned a rebuke from police, who told him "this is not essential travel".

And in a viral tweet this week, LBC's Matthew Thompson pointed out: "Every so often, you remember that in April 2020, Scotland’s chief medical officer [Catherine Calderwood] resigned because she visited her own second home, with her own immediate family."

Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party are all calling for the Prime Minister's resignation. At the time of writing five Tory MPs have announced they have written to the chairman of the 1922 Committee - which organises Tory leadership contests - to say they have no confidence in the prime minister.

This is some way short of the 54 letters required to trigger a vote, but people across the UK have made too many sacrifices to forget Johnson's betrayal.

When Johnson was a 17-year-old student at Eton, his teacher Martin Hammond wrote in his school report: "I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."

It seems that Johnson's conviction in his own exceptionality will, now, be his downfall.

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