There's also an unusually personal dimension. I expect a majority of people in the UK have either lost relatives or friends during the pandemic, and have had to follow rules regarding hospital visits and funerals that were pretty hard.
"The people" dont decide what front page news is though and the media played this one up for sure.
They (Barclay brothers/Murdoch/Rothermere) either decided Boris's days were numbered or that he needed knocking down a few pegs.
This is in contrast to two years ago when he was golden and they couldnt sing his praises hard enough. At the time the government was deliberately sending infected elderly patients back to care homes where they caused thousands of dead bodies to pile up - a story that got a disproportionately low level of coverage despite mattering orders of magnitude more.
Well, the point about the party story is that it's incontrovertible. With the handling of the pandemic itself, the media could spin, smoosh and soft-pedal the facts to make Boris look 'Churchillian'. Since they're completely spineless, that's what they did.
Going to a party while a sizeable chunk of people have traumatic memories of doing hospital visits through zoom will make those people hate you, and it's not very easy to smoosh, spin, or soft-pedal. It's just infuriating, and because the trauma of the pandemic was fairly evenly distributed, it has infuriated a very broad scatter of people. Presumably, some of them work in the news. Some of them are in the conservative party, even.
I can sort of feel the fire in my belly over this one because I didn't get to visit my grandad before he died, nor a close family friend. My grandad had no funeral, and I missed the family friend's because of a positive covid test. I'm not a fan of Boris's politics, but the party thing definitely cuts in a different place. I expect there are a lot of people out there who will remember some genuinely hard moments, remember what Boris was doing at the same time, and feel deeply angry.
Well, if you want to downplay it, you can point to a country like Belgium, which has a good GDP, so it's obviously a functional nation (right?), and point out their higher death numbers, then you can say that obviously the response wasn't perfect, but it was 'middle of the EU pack'.
Then the opposition has to say why it's not fair to compare death rates with poor eastern european countries, and explain that Belgium is spectacularly dysfunctional, etc, etc, and by that time, the conversation has moved on.
It's all a bit wonky and complicated. If the media were doing their jobs, if the opposition was doing their jobs, they would have baked this sort of machinery into the narrative - they are supposed to make stuff like this accessible for normal people.
The thing about the parties is it's a bit like if No 10 had their lights on full blast so they could have parties during the blitz blackouts. It's breaking a rule they set in a way that endangers the people around them. There's no way to equivocate or whatever: they broke an important rule, at a very hard time, that they set, for utterly trivial reasons.
Hypocrites like the Chancellor of the Exchequer putting up income taxes while his wife has non-domicile tax status on her 8 figure annual income rumored to be structured through the Cayman Islands, I guess?
I'm unsure whether we don't like hypocrites, or we like to promote them to office.
I do get that, I simply don’t get how it was/is the most important thing happening in the country. I remember having to scroll past all this on the bbc app to get at the Omicron news.
In a purely functional way, that makes sense. You already knew you're coming for omicron news and that you'll find them there - so you can scroll past the actual novel articles. More surprising or urgent things will be higher.
If it were actually a question of scandal, there are much larger ones that could be receiving media attention, like the enormous quantities of money embezzled from the government (read: taxpayer) under cover of the pandemic, or the deep connections between Tory party / Brexit campaign funding and very dirty Russian money. But those would reflect badly on the entire party in power, not just Boris. So we don't hear about those.
This is a nice, neat, Boris-only scandal. Perfect fodder for the periodic ritual cleansing of sins.
People don’t like hypocrites.