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People forced to cancel family celebrations during lockdown have called for Boris Johnson to resign for attending a birthday party inside No 10 in June 2020 when indoor socialising was prohibited.
Sons and daughters who kept their distance from parents and grandparents who have since died have told The Times how they stuck to the coronavirus regulations.
Laura O’Driscoll, 34, managing director of a recruitment company, from Bridgwater, Somerset, said her son’s 13th birthday at an arcade had to be cancelled in March 2020 and her grandfather had to spend the final days of his life alone in hospital in December 2020, when illegal parties were allegedly held in Downing Street and Whitehall. “If I had turned up with 30 of his friends, my son would have told me I was breaking the rules,” she said. “He has a better moral standing than a 57-year-old who was privately educated. Boris Johnson has proven time and time again that the rules don’t apply to him and I have never heard a proper apology come out of that man’s mouth.”
Tom Paine, 44, a copywriter from Bristol, said his daughter, who will be three in June, had never had a birthday party. “A week before she turned one, we now know Boris Johnson had his own birthday party with food and cake,” he said. “She didn’t have a birthday party with 30 guests. There was no gathering, and she saw her grandparents over the garden fence. She stuck to the rules.
“I’m angry about all of this. And yes, it’s just a birthday party and she is young enough to have many more in the years to come but that’s not really the point. Those were the rules at the time and we stuck to them,” he added. “I would be even more angry about this if I had to watch a loved one die in hospital via Facetime as Downing Street partied.”
Caroline Bentley, 47, from Hull had to cancel family celebrations for her parents’ golden wedding anniversary on March 21, 2020, and her son’s 21st birthday weeks later.
“I’m angry,” she said. “My parents are in their 70s and there aren’t going to be many years left and this was a special occasion and we had to cancel while certain people were having parties.”
Of Johnson, she said: “If he has any guts about him, he should resign. He knows he has done wrong and he has lied through his back teeth about it.”
Peter Reeve, 41, a live events business owner from Horsham, West Sussex, whose father died in June 2020, said the family had to have a restricted funeral.
“We had to have less than 15 mourners, which was very difficult because we are quite a large family,” he said. “I feel incredibly angry.” Reeve added that he had written to Jeremy Quin, his Conservative MP, on January 12 asking him to call for Johnson’s resignation but had not received a reply.
Darran Prosser, 59, from Neath, south Wales, said his grandson Bennett was due to celebrate his third birthday with a party in his local community centre in March 2020, but that it had to be cancelled.
“We were unable to physically see him so we Facetimed him which was a little upsetting but better than nothing,” Prosser said. “It was annoying, but at the end of the day we thought we were doing everything right and we thought everyone was in the same boat together. We were doing it for the country and humanity and they were the rules. I just cannot see how anyone could disagree with how wrong the man [Boris Johnson] is. It’s disgraceful.”
Ted Davies, 51, a teacher from south London, said he spent his 50th birthday with his 24-year-old son. “I was working from home trying to make the best of a bad situation with the only person who I was in a bubble with,” he said.
He said that the prime minister had displayed “rank hypocrisy” and it is “fairly clear something has to happen to not just Johnson but the government”.
Dr Neil Stone, a consultant in infectious diseases at University College Hospital in London, said he cancelled his child’s birthday “two years in a row” because of lockdowns.
Stone, who the Oxford English Dictionary credits as the first person to use the word Covid, said on Twitter: “My son took it well. Seems he was more responsible than the Prime Minister”.
