What next for Allegra Stratton?

The PM’s now-former press secretary has suffered the same fate as many before her but where will her undoubted talent lead her next, asks Sean O’Grady

Allegra Stratton reads a statement to the media outside her home on Wednesday (PA)

Looks like the wrong head rolled, at least for now. Allegra Stratton’s tearful media statement was as genuine and heartfelt as can be, in stark contrast to so many of Boris Johnson’s performances. The prime minister has the unfortunate knack of sounding phoney even when he is genuinely upset. Stratton’s remorse about “partygate” is obviously deep. It is sad, but also unfair, as she was not the biggest hypocrite in the room, or building. At least according to her training video, she actually went home on the evening in question, and thus cannot have broken the rules, leastways that time. She was the unwitting “star” of the training video, with her colleagues smiling, smirking and nervously laughing their way through a mock press conference, their guilt and acute embarrassment forcing its way through the jollity. And yes, Allegra, it was recorded and someone, presumably not a well-wisher, leaked it to ITV News, a former employer of hers. After that, it was only a matter of time. The backbench 1922 Committee presumably wanted a sacrifice, and she was the most high profile and most dispensable.

As many a spin doctor before her has discovered, when you become the story, in the words of Alastair Campbell, then your usefulness is exhausted. And so she went, just like Campbell, Andy Coulson, Damian McBride and others before her, who also found themselves too much the focus of media attention (albeit in varying ways).

Stratton’s problem, ironically, was that she wasn’t a very good liar. Though the jocular air of the practice briefing in the specially built £2.5m Downing Street studio was in poor taste, she wasn’t mocking bereaved members of the public. Rather, she was laughing, gallows-humour style, at the dismal absurdity of the situation. She merely betrayed the fact that she knew she was trying to defend the indefensible, and didn’t know how to do so without a blatant lie. Hence the release of nervous tension. She was laughing at her predicament, and that of her colleagues in the room who knew that they’d done wrong, morally and possibly legally. It was self-conscious, guilty, even fearful. It wasn’t malicious.