My advice for Boris on another fine mess

SANTA WAS AT CHRISTMAS PARTY – GOVERNMENT FALLS

That is a preview of a headline from next week. Also...

ONE YULE FOR US, ANOTHER YULE FOR THEM.

Sorry, couldn't resist that one.

But the media has missed the real story. If you read that report about Russian influence in London a while back you might have thought it was a mountain of piffle and laughably short of any evidence. And yet here we have the proof of a Putinian mole deep in the heart of government, undermining trust in our valued institutions, a Burgess, Blunt, or Philby of our modern era.

So in my new role as a freelance political advisor, for which I hope the cheque will be coming soon, I can make a number of suggestions to Boris Johnson as he tries to find a way out of this mess.

There is that saying that when you are in a hole, stop digging, to which we can add that when you have a political opponent in a hole, keep piling it on, and the Prime Minister is on the receiving end of a full-on pile-on at the moment.

If you have just returned from some foreign holiday and are not up to date, here is what has happened. While Boris Johnson, the well known Westminster painter and decorator, was pasting crisp £20 notes from a Tory donor to the walls of his London flat there was a Christmas party going on downstairs, except it wasn't a Christmas party and it didn't happen and he wasn't there anyway.

There was that famous comment by somebody in America charged with tax evasion who said that "only the little people pay taxes."

(It was Leona Helmsley, I've just looked it up).

The impression is being put about that in Britain only the little people obey Covid rules.

Anyway, back to my valuable political advisor advice.

Create a distraction. A piece of political misdirection. Press the nuclear button. Do something dramatic, like triggering Plan B.

Oh.

All right, then find a Labour Christmas party from last year to denounce. Any party. Surely there must have been at least one? What has happened to all those Labour clubs? Has Labour become such a miserable lot that they don't have parties any more?

If that fails, and as the basic accusation is underlying (pun/play on words etc. intended) hypocrisy, in that Number 10 staff were living it up when others were locking it down, he should immediately issue a pardon to all those who were prosecuted for holding Christmas parties last year. Make 2020 Christmas parties legal, retrospectively.

Another approach, and this one might be a tad controversial, is to declare all the Downing Street attendees of the party that did not happen as Heroes of the United Kingdom in their rejection of the draconian and anti-British restrictions which people have been going along with and have been informing on their neighbours like that little boy in Stalin's Soviet Union who told on his parents when they made some anti-Stalin remarks and as a result they were executed although it didn't do the little lad much good in the end as I seem to remember he was beaten to death afterwards by angry relatives.

Whoever is behind all these murky accusations is being euphemised as a whistleblower, but golly gosh, back at Eton we used to call them sneaks and snitches.

Those who were at this party which did not happen are campaigners, protesters, flag-wavers for traditional British freedoms to have a good time at Christmas.

I think I had better bring to readers' (or in the case of this column, reader's, apostrophes make a difference) attention that at the forthcoming North Shropshire by-election, which now has added significance as a referendum on Boris Johnson's recent conduct, there is a candidate called Russell Dean standing for the Party Party. Russell is a consultant for a yacht broker who lives in Monaco and is standing on an anti-sleaze platform.

Years ago there was another local election with a candidate standing on a Party Party ticket. I remember it particularly because when I wrote a preview of the election mentioning the Party Party candidate the editor of the day thought I had done a double and made a mistake.

Meanwhile some dissident has put up a Christmas tree in the Star office. I think it might be some kind of protest. But I'm staying away, just in case.