Imagine being a Downing Street cleaner – dealing with vomit and drunken snobs

The treatment of the invisible, dishonoured people in Number 10 is an echo of how they view the whole nation – down their noses

Will any of these disrespectful ill-mannered curs be disciplined? Or will a worthless, smirking ‘sorry’ suffice? (Getty Images)

On top of being the Covid lawbreaking capital of Britain, “Downing It” Street also seems to have had a bit of a problem with antisocial behaviour. Noisy parties deep into the night. Widespread and scheduled drunkenness. Vandalising little Wilfred Johnson’s swing. Creating mounds of litter and spilling wine over the walls, all to be cleared up at taxpayers’ expense.

The idiocy included at least one “minor altercation” as the Sue Gray Report delicately put it. On the whole, though she was quite blunt: “I found that some staff had witnessed or been subjected to behaviour which they had felt concerned about but at times felt unable to raise properly. I was made aware of multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff. This was unacceptable.”

A skilful drafter, Gray subtly suggests that there were other parties, as yet unchronicled, and no doubt more snobby abuse.

This is not the sort of disruptive activity that people on the council estates find so distressing – but it is plainly just as hurtful and ugly in its own way. Frankly, it is all the more unacceptable because of the people who were at the sharp end of it – cleaners and security guards, poorly-paid, many from ethnic minorities, hard-working, conscientious, responsible, and actually putting their lives on the line during Covid by going into places which may well have been Covid-ridden (as Number 10 and the Cabinet Office seem to have been).

It was the security guards at Downing Street, for example, who seem to have been the only people with the conscience, basic understanding of public health risks and respect for the law who tried to break up these raucous unlawful “gatherings”. For their pains, they were mocked.

Can you imagine the humiliation? A bunch of white, pissed-up (or worse), over-privileged, under-worked upper class twits on big multiples of their pitiful “living” wages taking the mickey out of them, with all the Olympic-grade sneering they learned at posh public schools. Arrogant, entitled narcissists, as Labour MP Chris Bryant called them.

Try, also, to place yourself in the shoes of the early morning cleaning staff who turned up to find the place wrecked on a regular basis, with a particular dread attached to a Saturday shift after “Wine Time Friday”. No one wants to clean out a bin full of putrid, half-digested Spad vomit – a mayonnaise of cheese, crackers and white wine.

Assuming, of course, that the special adviser managed to get to a bucket or make a call on the big white telephone and their spew wasn’t just deposited on the carpet. After that, you’d get on with scrubbing the red wine stains off the furnishings (in an echo of the minor altercation between Boris and Carrie when they were engaged just before he became PM, when she told him “You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt.”)

Who really knows what damage was done to the fabric of this fine, historic building by Johnson’s boozed-up, spoilt big babies?

As the ever brilliant Armando Ianucci points out, these revelations recall an episode of his (prophetic as it turns out) satire, The Thick of It. In “Spinners and Losers”, the hapless fictional minister Ben Swain gets angry at a cleaner who has the audacity to try to clear up the remains of his takeaway. Her story becomes public, takes on racist overtones, and the attempt to appease her with official apologies only makes matters worse.

True to form, Johnson’s parliamentary apology has also backfired, with one worker in the building declaring: “The prime minister’s apology is too little, too late. His empty words will be no consolation to the hard-working cleaners and security guards who have suffered under his leadership.”

Depressing as the response among most Tory MPs has been, it’s important to understand there were always two Partygates. There was the Partygate of the law and rules and investigations – the procedural one, if you will, the one centred firmly in the bubble.

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The other Partygate is the more important one – political Partygate. Political Partygate is the one that punched through to the country as whole, turning up on Ant and Dec’s show, and has been tried in the court of public opinion.

Being rude to people such as cleaners and security guards isn’t illegal and it can’t be a reason for the prime minister to resign, as no one suggests he was doing it himself. He says it appalls him, and he’ll apologise personally; but not everyone thinks him sincere. After all, he was a member of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford, where they used to vandalise restaurants and the initiation ceremony was rumoured to involve burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person.

What matters more is that these stories appall normal, decent people, who may well conclude that Johnson has to be held responsible for the kind of work culture he fostered and the types of people he recruited. Will any of these disrespectful ill-mannered curs be disciplined? Or will a worthless, smirking “sorry” suffice?

The treatment of the invisible, dishonoured people in Number 10 piles anger on anger. It is an echo of how they viewed the whole nation, and still do – down their noses. This is the Partygate that is playing out in the court of public opinion. It’s going down like a bucket of cold sick.