Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Hello and welcome to the spike podcast I'm Fraser Myers and back with me this week. As ever we have

Spiked editor Tom Slater. Hello. And Spike columnist Ella Wheeling.

Hi. Coming up on the show, The Return of Partygate, Ukraine 50 days On, the murder of David Amos and the French

elections. So this week Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were fined by the police that makes them the first

office holders respectively to have been sanctioned by the law while in office.

Tom this party gate scandal is back with a vengeance.

What have you made of it?

I've been slightly more unmoved this time around, I think it's fair to say.

I think a lot of us have sort of oscillated wildly between being quite infuriated by the double

standards and hypocrisy and all the rest of it but also quite unmoved by what is

ultimately being built up as a big political scandal but what it's about having

birthday cake or some socially

distance ring in a garden and you kind of move from one to the other.

I think with Partygate itself it was the fact that this started out as a kind of

of purl clutching media campaign trying to prove it as one rule for them and one rule for us and kind of often quite kind of inane kind of gotches over minor breakings of the rules but when you stack all these things on top of each other and then you look at some of the more egregious sort of violations like the party in the number 10 garden at the height of the first lockdown on the very same day Oliver Dowden announcing that we can meet one person outside. You can, it was just to the point where it was just an insult

to our intelligence.

I think the thing that gets missed in all of this, though,

is the fact that you've got a media,

which is hopping mad about this particular issue talking about it as a constitutional crisis

acting as if this is the worst thing that's ever happened and the most shameful thing that's ever happened

in British politics and yet this is the same media that fundamentally failed to submit the lockdown to any kind of proper scrutiny, if anything, egged it on.

They become obsessed with, you know, breaches of these unprecedented rules, but not particularly interested in the unprecedented rules came about in the first place.

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