In May 2020, David Wilson received a £1,000 fine after hosting an outdoor party he says followed coronavirus rules at his restaurant, Calypso, in Blackburn. He’s still fighting the fine in court, and is terrified that if his case fails and he’s asked to pay, he’ll be forced to close an 11-year-old family business that delivered food to vulnerable people during the pandemic. This, he said, was the reality for “the small man”, contrasting his experience with that of the prime minister and his associates, who have been fined for attending parties at 10 Downing Street during lockdown. “A £1,000 fine for us, £50 for them. It’s a joke. Where’s the justice? Apart from anger, I’m disappointed, because they’re playing it off thinking it’ll go away, it’s just a £50 fine. All the way through they’ve been having parties, when how many people were suffering who couldn’t see family or grandkids? I broke down crying seeing so much need from the people we were serving.”
His anger at the contrasting pandemic experiences was echoed by Callum Harrison, who received a fine for having two friends round to his eight-person houseshare in October 2020, when he was a student at Newcastle University. He recalls very heavy-handed “authoritarian” policing, with undercover cars and intimidating patrols in areas where lots of students lived. “The police were very aggressive, very hostile to us, even though we tried to reason with them and said it’s our first time breaking the rules.”
Each person present received a £100 fine, which he said represented “a few weeks of food” to him. He feels that, in light of the government’s breaches, fines people paid should be donated to charity. “It feels like one rule for us, one for them. They get away with murder constantly, the government should be ashamed of themselves. Looking back and the people who were supposed to be setting an example and who set the rules, they had numerous parties, it’s just not fair,” he said. Kieron McArdle, who received a £100 fine during the first lockdown when three friends visited him in his garden in Warwickshire for his birthday after he had spent weeks alone, considers the lies the worst aspect of the Partygate scandal. “It was the total disregard for other people and the lies that got me – there were no parties, there were no parties. The original line was that it was all work meetings. I could have said to the police the three guys here are my colleagues,” he said. “For the prime minister to lie in parliament, he’s broken the ministerial code, he’s got to go. He must resign. He’s got no credibility, he’s become a laughing stock.”
Ali Lawrence, a musician from York who was fined £200 despite showing police print-outs of the coronavirus rules he believed showed he was in line with the law, worried about the precedent Johnson’s behaviour might set. “The big excuse is that we can’t change our leader because of the war in Ukraine. But the way I see things is that, with all the atrocities in Ukraine committed by Putin, he’s obviously lying and everyone can see that. But how can the leader of our country call him out when he’s been proven to have done the same? It makes a mockery of it all. We need a leader who has to at least be seen to be honourable.”