[pasabagi]

Well, they did bury it. First, there were media figures (the wife of the editor of the Sun, for instance) at the parties, so obviously they didn't report on it at the time, and I remember when the first leaks started coming out, Laura Kuennsberg presented it as a 'Westminster drama' kind of story. It's impossible to imagine that media figures did not know the parties were happening at the time: Allegra Stratton is married to James Fortsyth (the editor of the Spectator), for instance.

I think the point is, british people generally have a lot of tolerance for amateurism, well-intentioned muddling through, and honest mistakes. That's a deep part of the culture. What they cannot stand is people who behave as if they are too important to follow the rules everybody else follows. That's why queue jumping is sort of like human sacrifice in the UK. When you combine an instance of this trope, with a traumatic national moment, it's going to have way more psychological impact than simple incompetence, no matter how much more damaging incompetence actually is.