Don’t miss the new play, Waiting for Sue Gray – an orgy of Tory-on-Tory violence

Some people have likened the interminable wait for the Sue Gray report to Waiting for Godot, but such comparisons seem wide of the mark to me. Isn’t the point about Waiting for Godot that you seem to wait for ever for something that never comes, and in the meantime nothing happens?

Waiting for Sue Gray, on the other hand, has been like a rolling live-action mash-up of Squid Game and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, which is clearly building towards a climax that may very well not disappoint.

Even the bit in Waiting for Godot where those two sadomasochists turn up chained together and start whipping each other seems perfectly normal when compared with what the Tories have been doing just to keep themselves busy before the Sue Gray report arrives.

As recently as God knows when ago, the main problem facing the prime minister was that Sue Gray had probably seen some emails that could make his life difficult regarding what he did or didn’t know about the bring-your-own-booze party in his garden that he still claims was a work event.

He now finds himself having to commission another investigation, this time into a claim by a former minister, Nusrat Ghani, that she was sacked on account of what somebody involved in her sacking described as her “Muslimness”. Johnson says he takes these allegations “extremely seriously”, which is why he’s launching an investigation into them right now, even though he’s known about them since May 2020, when they were directly raised with him.

And, when things appeared to go quiet for quite possibly four entire minutes, his anti-fraud minister, Lord Agnew, resigned at the despatch box in the House of Lords, because he simply could not take any more of the amount of fraud that is going on that no one is doing anything about. (It is barely two weeks since Rishi Sunak quietly announced he would not be seeking to recover any of the estimated £4.3bn lost to Covid fraud. And who can blame him? Any attempt to do so could uncover information that might embarrass him, and now’s not the time for that, not when the big prize is up for grabs. It’s only £4.3bn. Thank God for Mr and Mrs Taxpayer.)

We also learned that Sue Gray may well have had extensive chats with the Downing Street police detail, who are not-so-quietly letting it be known that the “explosive” evidence they have provided could be sufficient to end Johnson’s career “by the end of the week”.

It does seem just a little bit odd, doesn’t it, if it is to be believed. Actual police officers, telling a civil servant about the potential crimes they saw with their own eyes two full years ago, which they won’t investigate but maybe she would like to instead? Such things just don’t make sense, in what is still, at least supposedly, a vaguely normal country.

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Still, enough Tories really do seem to be waiting to see this report before they make up their minds about what they already know. Though one thing they probably don’t know about, which Gray is now actively investigating, is the extent of the parties and gatherings and comings and goings in Johnson’s own private flat, which would almost certainly amount to a more clear and obvious breach of the rules than what has gone before.

If that transpires, it seems vanishingly unlikely that anyone Waiting for Sue Gray will conclude that the report wasn’t worth waiting for after all. There are concerns that all this is shaping up to be something of a whitewash; that Gray’s findings, when they are eventually published, may be no more than two or three pages long, with the rest redacted. But she won’t be able to redact the evidence she gathered from Dominic Cummings, who will almost certainly publish, in full, anything he has shared with her.

It’s very clear that it can’t go on like this. Waiting for Sue Gray has been an orgy of Tory-on-Tory violence. On the vanishingly slim chance that it will vindicate Johnson, there is already nothing left to vindicate.