The email of the Metropolitan Police, forwarded by his lawyer, was written in a dry legal form. “On June 19, 2020 at the Cabinet Room 10 Downing Street between 1400 and 1500, you participated in a gathering of two or more people indoors at the Cabinet Room at Downing 10,” he said. This was his birthday when Carrie’s wife and others had arranged a party during the first lockdown for Covid. If this was a belated birthday present from the Met, it would not seem so. Mr Johnson had already been informed hours earlier that both he and Risi Sunak would be sent certain penalty notices. However, according to the official procedures of the police, neither of them had any idea what the violations of the law were. They were told they would have to wait for the details in letters to be delivered by post. “The message [from the police] was, check your post tomorrow or the day after. They had just told the people that he was going to get something and they were waiting for the people to wait a day or two or whenever the Second Class Royal Post would show up to say exactly what it was about. It was unsustainable. “ At the request of Johnson’s lawyer, police sent an email clarifying the offense. Initially, Johnson had no plans to make any public statements. “We always intended to either make a statement to the House or hold a press conference if the House did not meet,” said one expert. “But how can you do a press conference when you do not even know what is going on [the police] we speak;” Now the prime minister finally had the details, there had to be a public response, but Biden’s call, which was scheduled for 4.30 p.m. meant he had to stay at the Checkers and could not return to No. 10 for a media briefing. As soon as the call to the US President ended, he wrote his 314-word statement about the birthday party. The BBC’s deputy political editor, Vicky Young, had said it would be 5.30pm. for a concentrated TV clip on the Checkers, to get the prime minister’s first reaction to the news of his fine. To her surprise, she started reading carefully from a script. “It never occurred to me that this might be a violation of the rules,” he said. Although Johnson usually speaks without notes about such clips, he had treated it like a mini Downing Street press conference, where he starts with a statement and then receives questions, an aide said. Young initially received three questions, then negotiated for four and, like all hard-working journalists, pushed it further. Would he resign? Had not his power to tell others to obey the law been undermined? Did he take responsibility for the 50 police fines in total? Did he not lie in Parliament? Did he not understand his own laws? Would he be fined more? After her fifth question, she felt a slap on the shoulder to say that the session was over as the prime minister had to leave. Johnson, speaking in front of an 18th-century landscape painting, “The Russell and Revet Families with Fishing Rods and Toys,” had the look of a man feeling chased. Perhaps aptly for the prime minister’s critics, the painter Charles Phillips was a friend of William Hogarth, whose famous Progress Reik depicts the fall of a law-abiding waster. More fines seem inevitable now, especially as the birthday party was the shortest and seems to be at the milder end of the spectrum of events that took place during the lockdown. But Johnson’s allies insist the multiple fines will not change political thinking. “If you get caught running at 35 mph four times, that does not mean you have to run at 140 mph. “It does not mean that you really endangered life because the cumulative effect of all your speed at 30 mph is 140 pm / h, right?” said one.

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“It may be a neat mathematical trick, but it is not morally and legally valid. “And if you look at the nature of the event, when a guy walks into an office right outside of his own for nine minutes, that doesn’t mean a second one crosses a new threshold, right?” Johnson certainly had the support of the cabinet. The first senior minister to give a public response after the noon news of the prime minister’s fine was Brandon Lewis, the minister for Northern Ireland. He wrote on Twitter at 4pm that Channel 4’s third Derry Girls series aired that day. He texted a colleague that he was “just continuing to work”, along with a smiling emoji saint. Lewis later tweeted his full support for the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, but it was Culture Minister Nandin Doris who won the award for the first cabinet minister to be made public, even before any Johnson statement. . He had fully apologized and “fulfilled the priorities of the British people,” he said. Although it took several hours for Sunak to clarify that he was staying in place, the show of faith was finally done. Doris and other ministers retweeted Johnson’s own tweet that afternoon, revealing that he had briefed Biden on his trip to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just days earlier. And for the prime minister’s supporters, it was the 36-hour return trip to the Ukrainian capital that remained the highlight of the week. This, as well as a long-planned announcement of the No. 10 “grid” of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, was seen as proof that he was continuing his day job. The setbacks in Partygate, which are facing a political controversy, are similar to the current narrative for the coming weeks. Johnson had been given strict orders not to let any hints of a trip to Ukraine escape, keeping a poker face when asked at a No. 10 press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Solz if he intended to visit Zelensky in person. “We are trying to help people come from Ukraine,” Johnson told a German journalist. Boris Johnson fined for breaking lockdown rules (Photo: Marc Ward / PA) In fact, a request for a visit to Kyiv had been with Zelensky for weeks and had already been approved. Traveling with only one Downing Street assistant with military experience, he flew by train, train and road to Ukraine and met Zelensky on Saturday. In contrast to a strictly controlled visit hosted by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Johnson took an impromptu walk in the capital to help his friend show the world how something like normalcy was returning to its streets. “She had no idea who she was going to meet. “There are not many politicians on the planet who will take this political risk, let alone for security,” said one ally. The Ukrainian embassy in London made the news with a tweet that read “surprise”. In the end, Johnson’s trip was widely praised even by some of his would-be critics, especially after the Ukrainian government posted a video of the walk on Twitter. A man praised Britain’s contribution to his country’s war effort, while a woman gave Johnson and Zelensky ceramic cockroaches – a symbol of Ukrainian defiance since a rooster was left standing in a chest of drawers after the Russian bombing of Borodyan. Upon his return to the United Kingdom, Johnson took the cockroaches with him to the Checkers. On Monday, his spokeswoman said he intended to “rest and spend some time with the family” for a few days at the country’s shelter. He had shortly before his speech in Kent on Thursday to coincide with another secret trip abroad – that of Home Secretary Priti Patel to Rwanda, where he would unveil a controversial new deportation plan for migrants crossing the English Channel illegally. . Back in the United Kingdom, Wednesday’s confirmation that inflation soared to 7 percent caused a new upheaval in the “cost of living crisis” among Tory supporters, many of whom are campaigning for their seats ahead of the May 5 local elections. A backbencher confessed: “Some of us have shouted Boris, but people in our local parties have not. Many of them still love him. The penny will fall only if we lose councilors who have cut their guts to get elected. That’s when the scales can fall out of their sight. “ A former cabinet minister said the fines at Partygate, threatening to come further and the full report of the head of public service ethics, Sue Gray, would make life very uncomfortable. “We are all infected with it. It’s when it dawns on young people [the 2017 and 2019 election intakes] that things will move. Boris Johnson Meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv (Photo: Ukrainian Presidency / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) “This is irreversible, corrosive damage. Local elections may be mixed, but when we have the Sue Gray report, when Ukraine is off course, people will understand that we can not go on with it. “Things can change when one of the two things happens in Ukraine. Either the war is over, or people are just bored with the military pornography we watch all the time. And this can happen until the summer. “It is also inevitable that there will be another Boris cock-up, it is probably already in line to enter the public sector.” A former minister said Sunak’s quick death helped Johnson. “The absolute lack of candidates helps him. His strategy – as much as I criticize it – to have short poppies near him, works. “Why? It is very dim. Trash has very few friends. Hunt can be very weak. Tugendhat has a fan club, but also an anti-fan club. “But to be honest, looking at the Western leadership of Biden, Macron and Soltz, you do not have to do much to be better than them to help Ukraine.” A former cabinet minister said: “Some of the …