The PM will dismiss the Met’s fixed penalty notices – just like his student parking fines

It’s a funny old world, isn’t it. I suppose, if you think about it, there is a certain dysfunctional Johnsonian logic about Helen MacNamara, the former director general for propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office, being one of the first people to cop a fine for breaking the Covid lockdown rules. Which is to say, not really living up to the job title, but really wanting to have your cake and eat it. Not just the cake, of course, but the Prosecco and the karaoke too. And, according to reports, it was a “raucous” gathering where persons unknown had a drunken brawl.

MacNamara should really have been promoted to director general for propriety, ethics and cakeism studies in the Cabinet Office, but she went on to be deputy cabinet secretary instead, with an honour thrown in in due course.

When she was appointed as the ethics tsar, a government minister said that she was “a perfect official, fair-minded, doesn’t play games, will always try to get at the truth, capable of bringing sense out of five-sided talks.” Maybe the bit about not playing games didn’t include karaoke, which isn’t strictly speaking a game, to be fair.

Anyway, it all does indeed prove that you can have your karaoke and eat it, though if you’re unlucky, you’ll get a modest fine – £50 – and suffer some passing ridicule from the media. The fine, by the way, is equivalent to about a half hour of her last civil service salary, and she’ll not need to cut back on the heating to pay it.

Of course it’s unfair to malign a civil servant, but it’s all we’ve got at the moment, such is the curious way these things are ordered. No MPs, no ministers – none of the really big party animals have yet to be fined and/or identified. It’s just women who’ve been sacked or fined up til now, strangely enough. There are supposed to be 20 minor characters who’ve been caught, but we’re promised many more. We’ll see.

I’m happy to say it is probably inevitable that Boris Johnson will be one of them, but equally inevitable that he’ll shrug it off like he used to ignore parking fines during his days when he had to drive himself to parties. When he was a student in the 1980s, Johnson ran a Fiat 128 car (known unimaginatively as “the Italian Stallion”) an unremarkable saloon save for one very special feature – it was on Belgian number plates.

Thus, it could evade even the most determined parking enforcement officer the City of Oxford had at its disposal. He didn’t even bother to take the fixed penalty notices off the windscreen, leaving them there until the rain disintegrated them. Strictly, it was also against university rules to have a car in the city, but he didn’t mind that either. No doubt the same insouciance will be shown to the Covid fines.

In due course, the Met’s fixed penalty notices for Partygate may similarly end up discarded. Maybe little Wilf will masticate them into oblivion. “Fluff” is what he thinks of them, and fluff is what he thinks of everyone else, and the whole process – delayed, postponed, waiting for this, waiting for that – until Putin starts a war or something else turns up to distract everyone.

Not only, he calculated correctly, will people want to “move on” and tend to apply the Covid standards of today to behaviour in 2020 and 2021 (when the rules were far stricter), but an appalling armed conflict in Europe will divert criticism. One of the more trivial consequences of the war in Ukraine will be the unwarranted survival of a British prime minister.

Lying to parliament, though – surely he can’t smirk his way out of that? I’m not sure. His denials were usually caveated and craftily worded to allow an escape – being that his officials assured him that parties weren’t happening, and Number 10 and the adjoining 70 Whitehall is a very big place, and how can he be expected to know what was going on?

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Yes, there are pictures (let’s see them!) of him at parties and the like, but he didn’t think they were parties. This is the equivalent of telling the court that you didn’t realise you were doing 103.5mph on the M1 because the car was so smooth and quiet. The judge would look askance, but you can stick to your story because you know your mates will believe you, anyhow, and everyone speeds, don’t they?

In the case of Johnson and Partygate, what your mates think is as important as what the criminal justice system and the police think. If lying to parliament or knowingly misleading it is a resigning matter, or if breaking the laws you made are resigning matters, then who decides that you must resign? Who adjudicates on whether the ministerial code was broken? Why the independent adviser on ministerial conduct, of course – Lord Geidt.

But as we all know by now, he can’t start investigations himself, but has to be asked to do so by… the prime minister. The speaker of the House of Commons might take a view on a prime minister lying to the house, but he can’t actually do anything about it except tell them off and make his disgust known.

Apart from Johnson himself voluntarily quitting as a matter of honour, an absurdity as Olympian as the director general for propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office being fined for unethical conduct, the only people who can sack the prime minister remain his colleagues in the parliamentary Conservative Party. They might do it, but they’ll probably be inclined to wait (again) until after the local elections next month, at which point the fines will be further in the past, another long Commons holiday beckons, and Johnson can blame war, the last Labour government and Covid (ironically) for the cost-of-living crisis and general mess they’ll be in.

I think the prime minister might have another party to celebrate that. He could get MacNamara to organise the karaoke machine.