Sue Gray's week: As imagined by Brian Beacom
YOU’RE having a laugh, aren’t you? I can’t tell you how my Partygate report is going to read. That’s for the feeding frenzy you lot can enjoy next week.
But I will say that I take umbrage with those who say it’s going to be as predictable as Adele’s last-minute cancelling of her Vegas gig and then having a right good cry about it.
It will all be fair. I’m certainly not going to show favouritism. I know that Boris keeps on invoking my name, bellowing ‘Let’s wait for Sue!’ like I’m one of the Famous Five chums and we’ll be off picnicking together and drinking lots of fizzy pop and eating foie gras sandwiches. But it’s not like that at all.
I once ran a pub in Newry with my husband Bill, so I know about handling both sides of a divide. Some say I came across as Peggy Mitchell tough, and yes, I did cheekily tell some terrorists to get lost the night they tried to hijack my car on a dark country lane. But at the same time, when you’re dealing with madmen, in Savile Row suits or combat gear, you have to have a laugh, don’t you?
Yes, I know that this now sounds like I’m judging the Prime Minister already. But to be honest the information side of the task in front of me hasn’t been that difficult. He says there wasn’t a party, but if it was a party, he wasn’t party to any knowledge of party planning. Which is a perfectly sound argument if you’re six years old.
He loves to say, ‘Nobody told me, and nobody told me it was against the rules,’ which makes you laugh at the idea of Boris working in a vacuum, although he is actually, the vacuum being the part of his brain where ethics and morality would normally reside.
Yet, I do admit to feeling the pressure. Someone once declared; “She makes Robespierre look like a choirboy,” which was a nice thing to say, but I don’t see myself signing off anything like his 542 arrests.
You see, I’m a civil servant; it’s not my place to disrupt a system I’ve spent my life serving – except for the stint pulling pints in bandit country. And would you want to make a decision that could expand the political career of the likes of those whom Hugh Grant describes as ‘insecure nut jobs’? I’m thinking he’s talking about Nadine Dorries or Liz Truss – but don’t quote me.
Look, the bottom line is my job is not to lay blame. I’m not going to go all David Davies and say, ‘For God’s sake man, go.’ And I’m not going to get into the really big questions, the blackmail claims, of who really broke Wilf’s swing or whether Prince Andy will make a comeback.
To quote the late, great Meat Loaf, ‘I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.’ And we all know what ‘that’ is.
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