Beergate

[shewhomust]

Beyond that photo of Redhills illuminated for Lumiere, I have nothing coherent - no inside information, no grand theory - to contribute to the discussion of what Sir Keir Starmer was doing in Mary Foy's office last April. But it all happened very close to home, and conversation keeps turning to the topic.

• I've never been in Mary Foy's office; I have been to her predecessor's Christmas parties, which were held in the corridor outside the office, with mulled wine on the stove in the kitchen next door.


• What on earth have Durham constabulary found to investigate that will take them six weeks? In a case they have previously looked into, but on which they now have "substantial new information"


• - well, perhaps they have learned from the example of the Metropolitan Police, who anticipated back in February that their investigation of Partygate - for which they had the material previously gathered by Sue Gray - would take 'weeks rather than months' and yet are somehow still working through it in May (state of play at time of writing) -


• Of course I'm curious about what that new information might be. I've heard the suggestion that the police might previously have seen published photos, but not the original video (or an enhanced video, suggested Durham's student newspaper): would that count as "substantial"?


• I've heard a couple of references on the BBC to "an insider who was at the meeting", but only in passing - if there's any real evidence for that, please tell us more!


• Bear in mind that this is the force who investigated Dominic Cummings's trip (or trips) to Durham, and his excursion to Barnard Castle, and didn't think it was appropriate to impose a fixed penalty.


• Two wrongs do not make a right.


• I don't see what's so incriminating about the leaked memo of Starmer's schedule. I've only seen it flashing across the television screen, but once you are sending senior people across the country to campaign in elections, it makes sense to plan for feeding them.


• So, you send someone out to fetch a takeaway: are the people who are perfectly legitimately working together now supposed to scatter, to sit at a proper distance from each other in the gardens with their curry and beer?


• The tone of the reporting makes it sound as if the real offence was drinking beer. Because it's alcoholic, or because it isn't champagne? Your guess is as good as mine.


• Do I detect also a suggestion that the real offence is not breaking regulations, but hypocrisy in suggesting that Boris should not have broken them? I do think that lockdown was the right thing to do at the time, but I'm not sure that some of Starmer's critics do; or that if they were convinced at the time, hindsight and vaccine have changed that. There might also be a bit of blurred memory - exactly how locked down were we at any given period?


• I say that people working together is perfectly legitimate, because clearly that was within the rules. But I've never understood why. One of the things that baffled me about Downing Street was how many people seemed to be working there. Whatever they all do, couldn't they have done it from home? Did I really read somewhere that Downing Street staff were essential workers, and so exempt from working from home? And once people are actually spending time together, the infection doesn't care whether you are working or playing: which is why Downing Street was such a hotbed of infection.


• There's more. So much more, some of it trivial, some of it less so. What finally irritated me into spilling all this onto the page was the press coverage. Reporters who had mobbed Keir Starmer's every appearance demanding to know whether, if fined, he would resign, were now complaining that he had answered their question. This was putting unfair pressure on the police. What can I say? People lose their jobs every day because the police take the decision to prosecute. Somehow, the police manage to live with this. Let's pretend we don't think high profile individuals get different treatment...

And so on. And on. Now we wait and see what happens next.

I am aware this isn't the only thing going on right now. But it is the thing I have something to say about ...

ETA: Is it possible that this contains a clue to that "substantial new information"? Substantual? Really?