"The people" dont decide what front page news is though and the media played this one up for sure.
They (Barclay brothers/Murdoch/Rothermere) either decided Boris's days were numbered or that he needed knocking down a few pegs.
This is in contrast to two years ago when he was golden and they couldnt sing his praises hard enough. At the time the government was deliberately sending infected elderly patients back to care homes where they caused thousands of dead bodies to pile up - a story that got a disproportionately low level of coverage despite mattering orders of magnitude more.
Well, the point about the party story is that it's incontrovertible. With the handling of the pandemic itself, the media could spin, smoosh and soft-pedal the facts to make Boris look 'Churchillian'. Since they're completely spineless, that's what they did.
Going to a party while a sizeable chunk of people have traumatic memories of doing hospital visits through zoom will make those people hate you, and it's not very easy to smoosh, spin, or soft-pedal. It's just infuriating, and because the trauma of the pandemic was fairly evenly distributed, it has infuriated a very broad scatter of people. Presumably, some of them work in the news. Some of them are in the conservative party, even.
I can sort of feel the fire in my belly over this one because I didn't get to visit my grandad before he died, nor a close family friend. My grandad had no funeral, and I missed the family friend's because of a positive covid test. I'm not a fan of Boris's politics, but the party thing definitely cuts in a different place. I expect there are a lot of people out there who will remember some genuinely hard moments, remember what Boris was doing at the same time, and feel deeply angry.
Well, if you want to downplay it, you can point to a country like Belgium, which has a good GDP, so it's obviously a functional nation (right?), and point out their higher death numbers, then you can say that obviously the response wasn't perfect, but it was 'middle of the EU pack'.
Then the opposition has to say why it's not fair to compare death rates with poor eastern european countries, and explain that Belgium is spectacularly dysfunctional, etc, etc, and by that time, the conversation has moved on.
It's all a bit wonky and complicated. If the media were doing their jobs, if the opposition was doing their jobs, they would have baked this sort of machinery into the narrative - they are supposed to make stuff like this accessible for normal people.
The thing about the parties is it's a bit like if No 10 had their lights on full blast so they could have parties during the blitz blackouts. It's breaking a rule they set in a way that endangers the people around them. There's no way to equivocate or whatever: they broke an important rule, at a very hard time, that they set, for utterly trivial reasons.
Theres plenty of ways to equivocate. The story could also just have been buried like the tens of thousands of care home covid deaths triggered by gross negligence.
It didnt have to be given airtime. Were the media placidly cheerleading as it was two years ago it would likely never even have been investigated.
It was a deliberate choice for the tabloids to blanket us with partygate coverage and to trash Boris's reputation.
It's neither wonky nor complicated. The media are doing their job. Their** job IS to manipulate public opinion on behalf of their owners.
** Except for the BBC and the guardian who are more reactive and generally follow the pack.
Well, they did bury it. First, there were media figures (the wife of the editor of the Sun, for instance) at the parties, so obviously they didn't report on it at the time, and I remember when the first leaks started coming out, Laura Kuennsberg presented it as a 'Westminster drama' kind of story. It's impossible to imagine that media figures did not know the parties were happening at the time: Allegra Stratton is married to James Fortsyth (the editor of the Spectator), for instance.
I think the point is, british people generally have a lot of tolerance for amateurism, well-intentioned muddling through, and honest mistakes. That's a deep part of the culture. What they cannot stand is people who behave as if they are too important to follow the rules everybody else follows. That's why queue jumping is sort of like human sacrifice in the UK. When you combine an instance of this trope, with a traumatic national moment, it's going to have way more psychological impact than simple incompetence, no matter how much more damaging incompetence actually is.
They (Barclay brothers/Murdoch/Rothermere) either decided Boris's days were numbered or that he needed knocking down a few pegs.
This is in contrast to two years ago when he was golden and they couldnt sing his praises hard enough. At the time the government was deliberately sending infected elderly patients back to care homes where they caused thousands of dead bodies to pile up - a story that got a disproportionately low level of coverage despite mattering orders of magnitude more.