THE way things are going, there will soon be an investigation into the investigations into the lockdown-busting parties alleged to have been held in Downing Street.

The Conservatives will be telling us that no one should leap to judgement about whether Boris Johnson broke the rules he most certainly broke and told the lies he most certainly told, until the investigation into the Sue Gray investigation and the subsequent Met Police investigation has itself been investigated, by which time we will all have moved on to an entirely different scandal about Boris Johnson's lies, corruption and unfitness for office.

Having previously said that they were not going to investigate the allegations about what went on in Downing Street, which at the time was an eyebrow-raising development in Johnson's interest, the Met Police later did a U-turn. It announced at a time when it was in Johnson's interests to hide behind a police investigation that it doesn't want anything that's the subject of its inquiries to be revealed by the Gray report, which, ahem, entirely coincidentally and in no way because it's in Johnson's interests, has led to a further delay in the publication of a report which will now only be partial and which will not publish any information on the potentially most damaging allegations.

The Met refused to investigate the parties either at the time or at any time afterwards, right up until the very point when saying they would do so would delay and disembowel Sue Gray's report. That's not suspicious at all, and in no way reeks of a cover up. Oh no.

At this point, eyebrows have not just been raised – they are somewhere in low Earth orbit, where they are in severe danger of colliding with a communications satellite, damage to which will only provide the Conservatives with another convenient excuse to delay the release of a report proving what we all already know. Johnson is a corrupt serial liar with no respect for the rules who will do whatever it takes to cling on to power and doesn't care what damage he does to public trust in British institutions in the process.

Johnson and his allies continue to lie about the Gray report, insisting that it is "independent" – it is anything but. It is an internal Downing Street report being carried out by a civil servant whose boss is directly answerable to Johnson.

The big problem for Johnson and the Tories is that if the Gray report does indeed find evidence to show that the parties broke the law, Johnson's excuse that he didn't know that the gatherings were in breach of the rules might suffice for an internal Downing Street report, and might provide him with sufficient wriggle room to claim that the ministerial code was not breached, but it's not going to give him cover in a police investigation. Ignorance of the law is no legal defence, and certainly not when you are the guy who made the law in the first place. 

The Met Commissioner Cressida Dick has come in for a great deal of flak over this investigation, but it is worth noting that she said this morning that the police take cases more seriously and are more likely to investigate when they have good grounds to believe culprits are not naive idiots but should know the law and what rules they may be breaching. Johnson made the rules, so he can hardly argue he didn't know what they were. His attitude appears to be that since he made the law, it’s his law and he can break it if he wants to.

It's a sign of just how corrupt and unfit for government in a democracy that the Conservatives have become that most Conservative MPs appear to agree that Johnson and other senior Conservatives should not be bound by the laws they make.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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