A London judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police Service, for its alleged failure to investigate fully former Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the partygate scandal.
(Bloomberg) — A London judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police Service, for its alleged failure to investigate fully former Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the partygate scandal.
The Good Law Project, a nonprofit legal campaign group, had asked a London court to decide whether Johnson’s attendance at Downing Street parties at the height of pandemic lockdown restrictions should have been properly looked at by the UK’s biggest police force.
Judge Jonathan Swift ruled Wednesday that the application could not proceed to a full judicial review.
Johnson, and his the government, have been hit by multiple lawsuits from the Good Law Project over his administration’s response and handling of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, London’s biggest police force has been beset by a string of damaging scandals that have shaken public trust in the service.
“We are disappointed — but sadly not surprised,” said Jo Maugham, director of the group. “We think this decision ignores the quite proper questions that people have about what they understandably perceive to be differences of treatment between the powerful and the rest of us.”
Johnson’s spokesperson declined to comment. A Metropolitan Police spokesperson office didn’t immediately respond to a request for a comment.
“The failure to serve fixed penalty notices on Mr. Johnson and to close the investigation known as Operation Hillman as of May 2022 was despite evidence presented” in a civil servant’s report that he had attended and participated in the three gatherings, Danny Friedman, a lawyer for Good Law Project, said at the London court hearing.
Lawyers for the police force called the claim “tenuous,” according to documents prepared for the hearing.
(Updates with the judge’s dismissal of the case throughout)
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