Boris’s defence: ‘Nobody warned me it was against the rules’

‘Let’s wait for Sue Gray’ have been the five words on every ministers’ lips this past week, at least publicly. But following Dominic Cummings’s explosive claims last night that Boris Johnson lied to parliament, the PM was forced to break his silence. On a visit to a London hospital this morning, the embattled premier was asked by Sky about what exactly happened on 20 May 2020 — the ‘BYOB’ event organised by Martin Reynolds, his principal private secretary. Johnson denied he knew anything about the event in advance and said he was not aware the shindig broke Covid rules:

Nobody told me that what we were doing was as you say, against the rules. That the event in question was something that… wasn’t a work event. I can’t believe that we would have gone ahead with an event that people were saying was against the rules… Nobody warned me that it was against the rules.