The names of three of them had been cited in the inquiry into parties in Downing Street in full confinement of the British population during the Covid-19 pandemic. Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, British prime minister Dan Rosenfield, his principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, his director of communications, Jack Doyle, and his political adviser Munira Mirza all resigned on Thursday, February 3. Martin Reynolds is the one who had sent an email to a hundred people to invite them to a drink in May 2020.
After presenting his apologies to the House of Commons following the publication of a damning report by senior civil servant Sue Gray earlier this week, Boris Johnson announced that he was going to reorganize his services, without calming the criticism to which it is subjected.
The Prime Minister thanked Martin Reynolds and Dan Rosenfield for their “significant contribution to government”, including for 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.
Erroneous accusations against Labor leader
Munira Mirza slammed Boris Johnson for making an accusation “misleading” against the Leader of the Opposition when he was defending himself in Parliament after the publication of a damning internal report on these meetings in Downing Street, which attributed to him “mistakes of leadership”.
The prime minister had accused Labor leader Keir Starmer of allowing pedophile Jimmy Savile, the late former 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 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”, wrote Munira Mirza, head of policy at Downing Street, in her resignation letter published on the magazine’s website The Spectator.
It was a “partisan and inappropriate reference to an appalling case of child sexual abuse”, she said. Despite his call to do so, “you did not apologize for the misleading impression you gave”, she continued.
???? EXCLUSIVE: Munira Mirza, the Downing Street head of policy, has resigned over Boris Johnson’s Jimmy Savile attack… https://t.co/6J649rf1h4
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.
According to the tabloid Daily Mail, Jack Doyle, Boris Johnson’s communications director, told his teams it had always been his intention to leave two years after arriving at Downing Street in 2020, first in a junior role, and that his family life had suffered greatly from this scandal in recent weeks.
Downing Steet pointed out the « gratitude » from Boris Johnson to these two former advisers for their “contribution to the government”.