Red Box: Plan B - for be quiet about the party

In the Commons, Sajid Javid was savaged by Tory MPs, who are taking this development as well as you might expect. As the health secretary confirmed the introduction of vaccine passports, the cry came: “Resign!”

Whips confide that more MPs than ever are vowing to oppose the new measures, well-placed sources predict at least 40 are willing to vote down vaccine passports, and I already know of half a dozen 2019ers who joined the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group yesterday.

All of the above was predictable and predicted. But did anyone expect the prime minister to call for a “national conversation” on mandatory vaccination, almost as an aside?

“I don’t believe we can keep going indefinitely with non-pharmaceutical interventions — I mean restrictions on people’s way of life — just because a substantial proportion of the population still sadly has not got vaccinated,” he said.

It’s already clear from Scotland and Wales – where Johnson’s plan B was the devolved administration’s plan A – that a halfway house of restrictions is unlikely to have anything like the desired effect. Assuming, of course, that it passes the Commons – no safe bet.

That leaves a government that has set its face against imposing anything that looks like another lockdown – and a chancellor plainly unwilling to pay for one – with fewer options beyond starting that conversation than might be assumed.

2. Party politics
Whether it was the intention or not, neither those new restrictions nor Allegra Stratton’s tearful resignation have managed to completely overshadow another round of dispatches from Westminster’s illicit party scene.

The worst of the lot: the CCHQ Christmas shindig organised by Shaun Bailey’s campaign team last December. 25 guests, including No 10 advisers, were present, Santa hats were donned, Bailey was gifted a Lego set by a donor (the closest he’ll ever get to running anything), and things got so rowdy that the revellers damaged a door (again, probably the most significant contribution to public life Bailey will ever make). Staff were disciplined.

Up the road in 70 Whitehall, Dan Rosenfield, the PM’s chief of staff, is said to have been among participants at a Christmas quiz for No 10 aides that attendees allege turned into a session of late-night drinking. Add to the list a reported leaving do for comms chief Lee Cain on November 13, a second party in the No 11 flat that same evening, and another leaving do for No 10 aide Cleo Watson on November 27 and it’s clear Simon Case’s inquiry into the No 10 Christmas do on December 18 (keep up!) won’t be the end of anything.

3. Saj on the Case
Sajid Javid is on the broadcast round he should have been on yesterday morning. Speaking to Times Radio, he explained his no-show: “I didn’t turn up because I was upset by that video everyone has seen.”

Of those seven parties in and around Whitehall last year, he added: “I wasn’t even in government at the time... I think it’s important that Simon Case can do this... look wherever he needs to, speak to whoever he wants to, and establish the facts.” That at least sounds like a call to drastically broaden the scope and power of a hitherto tightly drawn inquiry into a single evening.

Back in the present, the health secretary was asked how he could expect public compliance after this week’s revelations. “That’s a fair question,” he said. Without answering it.

4. What the public think
Anyone still clinging to the consoling fiction that the public don’t care about things that happened a year ago will have been rudely awakened by yesterday’s glut of polling, which revealed...

...clear majorities of voters surveyed by Savanta ComRes, Opinium and Redfield and Wilton believe the prime minister should now quit... only 9 per cent of people told Opinium they believed the prime minister’s assertion that no party took place...

...and here’s one that could swing even more Conservative MPs behind the growing opposition to restrictions: Labour have a four-point lead in Redfield’s latest poll of voting intention... they come out on top with 38 per cent, with the Tories on 34 per cent, the Lib Dems on 11 per cent, the Greens on 6 per cent and Reform UK on 5 per cent.

Plastered across the top of the Telegraph this morning is the question: “Beginning of the end for Boris?” That paper, of course, the PM likes to call his “real boss”. His other real bosses appear to be asking the same question.

5. On your Ed be it
Downing Street’s spin team may have had a rough 36 hours but one blameless West Country hack has just as heavy a burden to bear. Ed Oldfield, an editor at news website DevonLive, was forced to spend yesterday clarifying that he was not, in fact, the twentysomething Downing Street spad caught cracking wise about Christmas parties.

Bombarded with thousands of tweets, he made a cry for help late on Tuesday: “Just to make something crystal clear tonight – I’m a journalist working in the West Country... NOT the special adviser in Downing St of the same name who appears in the leaked ‘Xmas party’ video.” Since then he has reconciled himself to his newfound notoriety, and reflects in a nice piece from the eye of the Twitterstorm: “The experience has actually been a good opportunity to share my journalism with a wider audience.”

Good on him for responding to trauma as only a journalist could – with ruthless self-promotion.