Cressida Dick confirms Met police will investigate Downing Street parties – live updates

Here is the statement from Dame Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan police commissioner, announcing that No 10 is now being investigated for breach of lockdown rules.

Q: Is the alleged party at CCHQ included?

Dick says there have been various reports in the media. She will not say which ones are being investigated and which are not.

But she repeats her previous points about how some events are not being investigated.

The questioning on partygate has now finished. Dick is now taking questions about the Stephen Port case.

Dick says she is “confident” in the inquiry the Cabinet Office has carried out into these events.

Q: When will you update the public on this investigation?

Dick says she cannot say. But she says they will not give a running commentary.

Dick says she is going to explain her general approach. They have followed the four E’s: explain the rules, engage with people, [encourage people to obey] and only enforce as a last resort.

She says most people responded very well to police engagement.

The police have “finite resources”, she says. This was a particular problem during the pandemic when people fell ill.

Normally it would not be a “proportionate” use of officers’ time investigating offences committed in the past. These are summary offences that attract fines.

She says it was better to focus on serious crime.

The police have guidelines. And sometimes the police have investigated retrospectively.

Some police officers were investigated after the fact for breaking Covid rules. And some high-profile people were investigated too.

She says these cases were “the most serious and flagrant” kind of breach.

Four conditions had to apply. There had to be evidence, she says.

She says those involved had to know they were committing an offence, the cases had to risk undermining the law, and there had to be little ambiguity about a reasonable defence.

She says the Met has a good relationship with the Cabinet Office. On the basis of what they have said, and on the basis of an assessment by the police, she says she can now confirm that the Met is investigating “a number of events that took place at Downing Street and Whitehall in the last two years in relation to potential breaches of Covid-19 regulations”.

She says other cases are not being investigated because they do not meet the threshold for criminal investigation.

The police will not give a running commentary, she says.

The first questions are about partygate.

Unmesh Desai, a Labour member of the committee, asks about government Covid breaches not investigated by the Met. He says public trust in the Met has waned. Will the commissioner review the way she polices the government?

Dick says the Met police “without fear or favour”, impartially, and in an operationally manner.

She says she has investigated more politicians than any other senior officer.

She says:

Dame Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan police commissioner, is appearing now before the London assembly’s police and crime committee.

There is a live feed here.

Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that Boris Johnson’s failure to follow lockdown rules was a moral issue. He explained:

Brown was on the programme to talk about his call for the international community to find billions of pounds to prevent starvation in Afghanistan.

According to the Guido Fawkes blog, Dame Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, will tell the London assembly’s police and crime committee that the Met will now investigate partying at No 10 when she gives evidence this morning.

The hearing starts at 10am. There is a live feed here.

Good morning. There have now been reports of so many parties or gatherings at No 10 during lockdown that it is hard to keep track (my colleague Aubrey Allegretti has a list here), but different events provoke outrage for different reasons. Some were outrageous because they were clearly full-on parties, by any definition, that could not remotely be described as work events. Two were inflammatory because they took place the night before Prince Philip’s funeral, when civil servants were supposed to be acting with particular decorum. The party in the garden on 20 May 2020 was a shocker too, because it took place despite the organiser being told being advised it was a mistake, and Boris Johnson turned up himself and now claims not to have realised it was against the rules.

In some respects the latest revelation is less serious. Whether it was a proper party is in dispute. But because it was a birthday event, it has huge resonance for all of us who did forgo proper birthday parties during lockdown because we were prepared to follow the rules outlined so often by Johnson himself.

Here is our overnight story, from my colleagues Jessica Elgot and Aubrey Allegretti.

By chance or design, Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, was doing the broadcast round for the government this morning. Shapps is one of the best broadcast performers in government, and if anyone can put a relatively positive gloss on a PR monstrosity, it’s him. But today he didn’t really try.

Yes, he argued that the event was not technically a party. He stressed that it was important to wait for the Sue Gray report into partygate. He praised Johnson’s record on Covid and the vaccine rollout, and he argued that events like the Russian threat to Ukraine were more important.

But, in his interviews, Shapps did not try to defend the birthday party/gathering and he did not contest claims that it was against the rules. “I don’t want to present a defence because I would be adding speculation to speculation,” he told the Today programme’s Justin Webb. And later Shapps said:

When it was put to him that the birthday event should not have gone ahead, Shapps said:

Webb then put it to him that Adam Wagner, a lawyer who’s an expert on lockdown rules, says the birthday celebration in the cabinet room was clearly against the rules.

Shapps did not contest that. He said the event was “unwise, I’m sure, given the circumstances as we know them”.

And Webb put it to him that he knew, in his “heart of hearts”, this was not defensible. Again, Shapps did not try very hard to disagree.

Other ministers giving interviews on partygate in recent weeks have struggled, but it is hard to recall anyone putting up the white flag quite so easily. If the person put up to defend No 10 won’t even try to defend it, the PM might be in even more trouble than he realised.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Boris Johnson chairs cabinet.

10am: Dame Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Metropolitian police, is questioned by the London assembly’s police and crime committee.

10am: Lord Evans, chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, gives evidence to the Commons standards committee on the code of conduct for MPs.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

2pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, gives a Covid statement to MSPs.

2.30pm: Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, gives evidence to the Commons defence committee on Afghanistan.

2.45pm: Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, and colleagues give evidence to the Commons standards committee about the code of conduct for MPs. At 3.30pm the MPs Jess Phillips and Sir Desmond Swayne will give evidence.

4pm: Sajid Javid, the health secretary, gives evidence to the Commons health committee.

I will be covering some UK Covid developments here, but for further coronavirus coverage, do read our global live blog.

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