The cabinet secretary must be kept under pressure to protect the public interest and the rule of law not the prime minister
It is extremely tempting to dismiss the inquiry into last year’s Downing Street Christmas parties as a phoney exercise that will produce a bucket of Whitehall whitewash. After all, the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, who is conducting the inquiry, was handpicked by Boris Johnson to be his principal civil servant only last year. And few prime ministers, least of all one as slippery as Mr Johnson, are in the habit of assigning such inquiries to people who could make life difficult for them.
Mr Case may also have played a role in the events he is investigating. Although the Cabinet Office says Mr Case did not attend any of the Christmas “gatherings”, it is not clear whether he was the source of the “repeated assurances” on which Mr Johnson relies to claim that there was no Christmas party in No 10 in 2020. Common sense suggests he may have been, and the paymaster general, Michael Ellis, twice failed to answer the question on Thursday. If he was indeed that source, and the inquiry concludes that there was no party, it will be a tainted finding. If he concludes that there was one, Mr Case’s own head may be on the block. For these reasons, it would have been better to give the job to someone more clearly independent.