Today in Brexitland, March 7, 2023

What’s really going on with the Sue Gray and Simon Case assault on the senses

The Tory press are really determined to keep the Sue Gray story running for as long as possible. They seem desperate to have this cut through to the masses, even though that appears to be a tall order. Although not completely impossible, and given they have so little to attack Starmer on, one could suppose they are doing this out of justifiable desperation. That’s part of it, but only part of it.

Running as a sort of B-plot to the Sue Gray story is Simon Case, the current cabinet secretary, and his part in the leaked WhatsApp messages involving Matt Hancock. These two items might seem to some as unrelated - the Gray thing is about whether she was impartial or not when making her report into Partygate, the Case story is about how Covid was conducted in 2020/21 - but they are deeply linked. Both of them are really about those currently running the Conservative party and some of their supporters in the press wishing to tarnish the reputation of the civil service as much as possible.