If he remains in place for the moment, this is not the case for his team. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson lost four influential aides on Thursday in the wake of the lockdown Downing Street holiday scandal, further weakening his position.
Downing Street announced in a press release published in the evening that it had accepted the resignations of Martin Reynolds, the chief secretary of Boris Johnson who had sent an email to a hundred people to invite them to a drink in May 2020, as well as that of his chief of staff Dan Rosenfield, a year after his arrival. The prime minister thanked them for their “significant contribution to government”, including their work on the pandemic and economic recovery, a spokesperson said in a statement. “They will remain in place until their successors are appointed,” he added.
The announcement of these departures had been preceded during the day by those of Munira Mirza, head of policy at Downing Street, and the head of communications Jack Doyle, who would have participated in one of the parties in question. Munira Mirza has slammed Boris Johnson for making a ‘misleading’ accusation against the Opposition Leader when he was defending himself in Parliament after the publication of a damning internal report into the Downing Street meetings, which blamed him for leadership errors.
The Keir Starmer controversy
The Prime Minister had accused Labor Party leader Keir Starmer of allowing pedophile Jimmy Savile, ex-BBC star, to escape justice when he headed the British prosecutor’s office. The use of this accusation, widespread in conspiratorial and far-right circles, caused an outcry. Keir Starmer himself has accused Boris Johnson of repeating “fascist conspiracy theories to score political points on the cheap”.
“There was no reasonable or just basis for this assertion,” Downing Street policy officer Munira Mirza wrote in her resignation letter. published on the website of The Spectator magazine. It was a “partisan and inappropriate reference to an appalling case of child sexual abuse”, she said. Despite her plea to do so, “you have not apologized for the misleading impression you gave,” she continued.
A former member of the defunct Revolutionary Communist Party, Munira Mirza worked with Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London between 2008 and 2016. Downing Street has confirmed her departure, as has that of communications director Jack Doyle. According to the tabloid Daily Mail, he told his teams that it had always been his intention to leave two years after arriving at Downing Street in 2020, initially in a junior role, and that his family life had suffered badly. of this scandal in recent weeks.