Delingpole: I Don’t Trust the ‘Downing Street Christmas Party’ Story

Everyone (well, everyone even vaguely interested in UK politics) is talking about the secret Christmas party held last year in 10 Downing Street, apparently in defiance of lockdown and mask regulations. But there’s lots about this story that just doesn’t add up.

Sure, I can easily accept that there was such a party. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve noticed in the last 18 months from Nancy Pelosi’s hairdresser appointments to the mask-shunning antics of the world leaders at the G7 summit in Cornwall, our political elites are very much in the business of ‘Do as I say’ but not ‘Do as I do.’

But still I smell a rat.

For example, it is claimed the leaked footage was recorded on 22 December 2020, by a camera appearing to record a monitor feed of the Prime Minister’s then Press Secretary, Allegra Stratton. In the film it appears that she has been caught in an unguarded moment, accidentally letting slip details and then feeling awkward at having done so.

One thing that’s odd though is the backdrop: the Downing Street press briefing room with its blue screens and wooden panelling and its furled Union flags. This room wasn’t officially unveiled to the media (it cost £2.6 million, much to everyone’s scandalised horror) until the following year in March 2021. This was over six months after the former colonial courtroom’s conversion to a press suite was announced.

Are we expected to believe that this briefing room was the first government project completed ahead of schedule in recorded history — that it was actually ready in December, two and a half months after it was announced, and then kept on ice for three months, unused?

And what about Stratton’s supposed faux pas? She is an experienced journalist and canny political operator — indeed, that is exactly what the government, until today, paid her to do. When you’re in a role like that you are never off, especially when in front of a camera. It seems highly unlikely that Stratton would have offered up a hostage to fortune in the form of indiscretions about a Christmas party with a camera running.

Equally, would ITN have yielded up this footage without behind-the-scenes approval? Sure, scoops are nice. But why would establishment-cozy-club ITN wish to jeopardise its access to and relationship with 10 Downing Street by throwing an insider like Stratton to the wolves?

Perhaps the most suspicious aspect of the story is the timing of the release. Why now, when this footage has apparently been knocking around a whole year?

And why also is it being pushed so hard and given such widespread currency in the MSM?

Remember, we are talking about a mainstream media so heavily compromised, so bought and paid for by government advertising, that is most unlikely to be promoting this story because it has suddenly acquired a set of cojones and a newly acquired urge to speak truth to power.

If I’m right, then let me advance a few possible explanations for this ‘leak’, none of them remotely encouraging.

1. It is part of the ongoing operation to oust Boris Johnson as prime minister. It may even be that he has had enough and wants this to happen anyway. But no consolation should be drawn from this. Whoever replaces him will be at least as bad if not worse.
2. It is designed to whip up public indignation about Covid rule violations, wheresoever they may be. Never mind those naughty guests at these alleged Downing Street parties a year ago: the people really being targeted are mask and vaccine and lockdown refuseniks today.
3. It is a test, designed with the cunning help of the government’s battery of behavioural scientists. The idea is to gauge just how strongly the public feel about lockdowns and the enforcement thereof – then the government will be in a better position to decide how fast and far it can push the next stage of its inexorable progression towards biosecurity state tyranny.

Perhaps I’m being unduly cynical. But the Boris Johnson administration, taking its lead from the prime minister himself, is so routinely mendacious that if it told me the sun rose in the morning and set in the evening I wouldn’t believe it unless I’d gone outside to double-check.