In the 19th-century Welsh Marches, when someone lay on their deathbed, folklore reports that it was usual to summon a person known as the “sin-eater”. This person would place a plate of salt on the dying person’s breast, then a piece of bread on the salt. Then, as a witness described in 1852, the sin-eater “muttered an incantation over the bread, which he finally ate, thereby eating up all the sins of the deceased”.
Today’s sin-eater is yesterday’s cake-eater: the Prime Minister who not long ago was being castigated for not imposing lockdown rules swiftly enough, and is now being berated for never really believing the rules. Meanwhile, no one respectable wants to look at whether the rules he imposed, with overwhelming public support, were themselves worth the price.
The rules were harsh and the No. 10 breaches were numerous: “socially distanced drinks”, boozing on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, leaving and Christmas parties, cheese and wine. The list goes on; but the minutiae are less important than the cumulative sense that the Government, presided over by Johnson, carried right on with normal, sociable working life while the rest of the country dutifully took the lockdowns literally and endured a self-imposed state of alienation, isolation and misery.
No doubt some measure of the resulting media feeding-frenzy is powered by people who raged at Johnson’s Brexit-era political untouchability. His haute Remainer haters are hugging themselves with glee to find him now not only touchable, but downright tarnished.
This group would try to turn Boris forgetting to put the loo seat down into a resignation offence. But beyond this Greek chorus, Partygate has cut through all the way to the sensible people who take even less of an interest in Westminster court politics than I.
Some of this is about offences against the British sense of fair play. After the Great Crash, David Cameron declared that “we’re all in it together”, a slogan regularly flung back at him when (as was often the case) his policy decisions seemed to fly in the face of this high sentiment.
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