On 23 December last year, the day after Downing Street aides were recorded laughing about how they could pretend that a party at No 10 was a “cheese and wine” gathering, a large contingent of police officers arrived at the London Tavern pub in Hackney, east London. James Kearns, the owner, was hosting Christmas drinks for workers at a scaffolding company he also runs.
“There were 15 of us,” he said on Wednesday. “About 20 of the police showed up, absolutely hammering on the doors. We all hid in the toilets, but they found us.” This week, the case went before a magistrate. “And we’ve all been fined £100 each.”
He and his team have been discussing the Downing Street story in the last few days, he said. “It’s absolutely disgusting. Why do we get a fine and they just have a good laugh about it? If we get prosecuted, they should be too. What’s the difference?”
The Downing Street party had taken place the previous Friday in spite of official rules that said such gatherings were not allowed. Dozens of staff crammed in together, played party games and distributed secret Santa presents, sources have told the Guardian and other outlets. When the news broke that the party had happened, the government denied it. But the emergence of the video that so angered Kearns has prompted an investigation and a prime ministerial apology.
Almost a year later, memories of the sense of crisis engulfing the country on that day may have faded a little – but at the time, it was palpable. The headline on the Daily Mail’s front page that Friday was “THE BLEAKEST MIDWINTER”, while the Guardian reported that hospitals were running short of beds, with 15,465 Covid patients in hospitals. On the same day, 28,507 new coronavirus cases were reported – bringing the seven-day total to 167,713, a rise of 40%.
For Jackie Green, 18 December is imprinted on her memory for the worst reasons. At 1.20am, she got a call from the hospital where her 86-year-old mother, Beryl Harris, had contracted Covid on the ward. “And they were calling to tell me she had passed away,” Green said, her voice breaking as she spoke. “When I put the phone down, I just sat and howled. The pain was just incredible. Mum was my only relative.”
After the call ended, she said, “I just sat there. I couldn’t move for probably two hours.” Green, who lives on her own, spent the evening of the 18th alone at home. Her mother was one of 489 people who died of coronavirus that day.
“When I first watched the clip, I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing,” said Green, who is 59 and works in communications. “It took a while, several watches, for it to sink in. Obviously, anger was my primary emotion. That they just didn’t care. It was just a joke to them.”
She felt “disbelief at how people could behave like that. It was just absolutely extraordinary. These people are supposed to be leading this country.” She said she was appalled that “they would have the party in the first place, that the rules didn’t apply to them and they could do exactly what they wanted – but also think it was funny afterwards”.
Publicly, at least, Boris Johnson had seemed acutely aware of the necessity of following the rules. Just hours before the Downing Street party, he told the public: “If you are forming a Christmas bubble, it’s vital that from today you minimise contact with people from outside your household.”
Two days earlier, London had been put into tier 3, which meant that “a work Christmas lunch or party” was prohibited “where that is a primarily social activity”. The escalation in the case count was so sharp that on Saturday, Johnson was forced to reverse his previous insistence that cancelling Christmas would be “inhuman” with the bombshell announcement that 18 million people would be placed in new tier 4 restrictions would not be allowed to visit their loved ones on Christmas Day.
If Downing Street staff had any doubt about the rules, they did not have to look far to learn the public view of the government’s own ministers. On Thursday, the home secretary, Priti Patel, had accused Tory MP Tobias Ellwood of breaking the rules by attending a Christmas dinner at a private members’ club.
She agreed he had committed an “egregious” breach and, when asked if he should face police action, said: “There are fixed-penalty notices. I don’t know the details as to where this happened or the location, but I’m sure … as it is a breach, that will be followed up.”
Anyone tuning in to Sky News to seek more details on that story would not have seen Kay Burley, the channel’s best-known presenter, who had been suspended from work a week earlier for six months after holding a party of her own – for just 10 people.
Across the country, too, the perceived gravity of such events was clear. Kearns is one of many to have been prosecuted over breaches around that time; it emerged this week that just before 8pm on Friday night, roughly when the Downing Street party would have been taking place, police in Ilford were investigating a gathering indoors at someone’s home. The following day, members of a Cornwall football team went for a Christmas night out in Plymouth, an event that prompted the club to say it was “truly appalled”.
Kearns recognised that the police had a job to do over such cases – but said he was “staggered” by the appearance of a different rule for those at the centre of power. “Ours was a works drinks do, exactly the same, but a lot fewer people,” he said. “It’s hypocrisy, pure and simple.” The Met police said on Wednesday that it was “considering” the case in the light of the video, but reiterated its earlier statement that “it is our policy not to routinely investigate retrospective breaches of the Covid-19 regulations”.
Jackie Green remembered the pressures of that period with excruciating clarity – and the sacrifices they had meant for her and her mum. “I hadn’t seen her since the February before,” Green said. “I spoke to her every day on the telephone for an hour. Mum was shielding because she was so frightened of Covid. She was very, very careful.
“That all seems for nothing now … The fact that I didn’t see her and she died on her own. She was extremely worried and frightened. She kept saying: ‘I don’t want to die.’” They had been hoping to spend Christmas together. Instead, Green spent it alone.
On that Friday night, nothing could ease Green’s grief. Friends called her, but “nobody can say anything or do anything to make it feel any better”, she said. Above all, it is her mother’s isolation in the last months of her life that has stayed with her. “She was incredibly lonely,” she said. “But even if I’d wanted to break the rules, she wouldn’t have let me.”