More than 50 people must answer police questions about alleged parties in Downing Street and Whitehall that may have breached strict Covid rules, Scotland Yard has said. In a sign of the scale of the “partygate” criminal inquiry, the Metropolitan police revealed on Wednesday they would this week start contacting more than 50 people as part of “Operation Hillman”, an investigation into events on eight dates between May 2020 to April 2021. Those identified by police – likely to include Downing Street staff and civil servants, and possibly including Boris Johnson and his wife, Carrie, who are alleged to have attended events – will be sent a formal questionnaire with legal status, which asks recipients to give their account of the events. Their response must be provided within seven days. The questionnaires will be reviewed by the Met’s special enquiries team, it is understood. If Covid regulations have been breached “without a reasonable excuse”, a fixed penalty notice (FPN) will normally be issued, with the paperwork first sent to ACRO, the criminal records office. Even if admissions are made by those contacted by police, a fine does not automatically follow, however. It came as the Met said it would look again at a quiz held in No 10 in December 2020 after a new photo emerged of Boris Johnson at the event, featuring an open bottle of prosecco and staff wearing tinsel. The image published by the Daily Mirror shows the prime minister with two members of staff, including his deputy principal private secretary, Stuart Glassborow, at the event on 15 December, which No 10 has said was a virtual quiz. No 10 has previously committed to disclosing whether the prime minister receives a fine, though sources have briefed that he is not intending to resign. Many Conservative MPs have suggested he should be removed from office if he is found to have committed a criminal offence. Johnson has denied he broke any law. Asked at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday if the Metropolitan police should add the virtual quiz to the events they are investigating, Johnson said the allegation was “completely in error”.
However, the Met later issued a statement saying it would reexamine the event in the light of the new picture. “The Metropolitan Police Service previously assessed this event and determined that on the basis of the evidence available at that time, it did not meet the threshold for criminal investigation. That assessment is now being reviewed,” the statement said. At the time the photo was taken, London was under tier 2 restrictions, which banned social mixing between households. The government had explicitly told people they must not meet for Christmas parties. Johnson was challenged about the image at PMQs by the Labour MP Fabian Hamilton who said: “It looks a lot like one of the Christmas parties he told us never happened.” Johnson appeared to deny the characterisation, saying Hamilton was “completely in error” and said the event had “already been submitted for investigation”, a hint Downing Street believed it had been disregarded.
The Met police are already examining potential law-breaking at 12 gatherings on eight dates in Downing Street, three of which Johnson is known to have attended. A fourth event, in his Downing Street flat, is also under investigation and the prime minister has declined to say whether he was there. The prosecco-fuelled virtual quiz on 15 December was not among those gatherings investigated by the Met. In a statement on Wednesday evening, police confirmed they had been handed more than 300 photographs of events in Downing Street and 500 pages of evidence. Detectives may contact more people in the coming weeks, Scotland Yard said. A full report from the Cabinet Office official Sue Gray, who was asked to investigate the rule-breaking, is also expected to be released once the police work is concluded. The former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings, now a fierce critic of Johnson, said further pictures would soon emerge. “There’s waaaaay better pics than that floating around, incl[uding] in the flat,” he tweeted in reference to the prosecco quiz picture. “The pics will come out and the public will think ‘Met [police] lying’, not ‘oh PM innocent after all’. Penny dropping with MPs.”
The new picture came to light hours after sources suggested Johnson did not intend to resign if he was given a FPN, though MPs could trigger a vote of no confidence. Mark Spencer, the former chief whip who has been moved to be leader of the House of Commons, told the BBC on Wednesday that most people had “had a drink” during lockdown. “I think clearly people were having a drink,” Spencer told BBC Radio Nottingham. “I’ve done that. I’ve had a drink of alcohol during Covid.“It’s fair to say that Downing Street didn’t get everything right but let’s focus on the real world here. People are worried about their jobs, people are worried about the NHS.” Separately, Scotland Yard said officers would not launch an investigation into allegations that MPs seeking to remove Johnson from No 10 had been blackmailed, after concerns were raised by Conservative MP William Wragg.