Hello and spike

welcome to the spike podcast I'm Fraser Meyers and with me this week as ever we have spiked

editor Tom Slater and spike columnist Ella Whelan.

Hi.

Coming up on the show the never-ending partygate saga, Joe Biden's accidental warmongering, the demise of the Ministry of Truth,

and racist babies. So this was the week the media certainly have been waiting for. I don't know if you

were looking forward to Sue Gray Day, the publication of the Civil Servants report into the

Prime Minister and various Downing Street rule-breaking parties. I mean, Tom, this

saga has been going on for so long now. Have we really learned anything new this week?

Not really, no. I mean the report itself was really just a kind of repackaging of things that we'd already found out

via the media, obviously partly through the Met investigation,

and who got fined for what, a few extra details, which we might get into.

But, you know, we've known the bones of this story for best part of six months now.

Yeah.

Most people have made their mind up about it.

And to the extent that it was a revealing week, it was only revealing as far as how

obsessed the media were with it, it was bizarre. I mean it was actually quite entertaining in how bizarre it was.

There was all of this buildup in the days before you had a BBC panorama investigation talking to former number 10 staffers, their faces and voices obscured like

they're in witness protection or something, you know, piously and toning about these parties that they

gladly went to a year ago. Sam Coates from Sky News, you know, setting up outside Downing Street

and shouting moralistic questions at cabinet ministers. Are you ashamed? Are you proud?

This government's and javid and all this kind of fever pitch and then it landed and, you know,

...