Gary Neville praised for calling out Boris Johnson over alleged Number 10 Christmas parties

Gary Neville has slammed Boris Johnson and his ‘cronies’ for allegedly partying in Downing Street last Christmas while the rest of the country remained under Covid restrictions.

The Prime Minister was reported to the police by Labour MPs last week over allegations there were at least two parties in Downing Street during lockdown restrictions last Christmas.

The Daily Mirror also reported that two events had taken place in No 10 in the run-up to the festive season, where officials are said to have ‘knocked back glasses of wine during a Christmas quiz and a Secret Santa’. 

It was claimed that around ‘forty or fifty’ people were ‘crammed cheek by jowl’ into a medium-sized room in Number 10 for each of the two events.

Number 10 / Flickr

The Prime Minister has not explicitly denied that the parties took place, but No 10 has insisted that ‘all Covid rules were followed’. 

And now, as the allegations continue to be investigated by the Metropolitan Police, former Manchester United footballer Gary Neville has called out Boris Johnson and his government, slamming them for ‘partying in a tax payer funded residence’.

He wrote: “Are we really going to let this Number 10 party go? No chance! Last Xmas was a misery. Listening to him standing up there telling us what we couldn’t do.

“Families not seeing each other , loved ones dying alone. Whilst him and his cronies party in a tax payer funded residence!”

His impassioned tweet was quick to go viral, with thousands of people rushing to applaud him for speaking out. 

One social media user urged the former footballer to not let the issue go, writing: “Last [Christmas] we lost so many loved ones and couldn’t say goodbye in person. We were not allowed to pay respects at funerals due to the restricted numbers.

“Gary, don’t let this go, we are with you. I am extremely angry, upset & saddened. I want this corrupt govt held accountable.”

Another person wrote: “Keep asking, @GNev2, and keep the pressure on. We also need to know WHO was at @BorisJohnson’s Christmas shindig. Somebody knows.”

Neville has since followed up his tweet with a copy of a letter penned to his local MP, Mark Logan, wherein he enquires for an explanation as to why Bolton residents were forced into lockdown over Christmas ‘while the Prime Minister was partying with his colleagues and friends’.

In the letter, Neville explicitly asks Logan if he had attended any Christmas party related events with the Prime Minister or Cabinet, asking him to also ‘state your position on this matter’ and to get access to the attendee list. 

His letter continued: “We need MPs to stand up and show the courage to do the right thing and speak out against wrongdoing and admitting when it has taken place… Hancock, Johnson and no doubt many others are living by different rules.”

The former footballer has encouraged his followers to each write a letter to their own local MPs on the matter.

Though this isn’t the first time Neville has waded into the messy world of politics; back in October, he went head-to-head with former Tory politician Edwina Currie in a heated debate about the government’s plan to axe the Universal Credit uplift.

He slammed the Conservative’s language as ‘always divisive’ and ‘not helpful’, saying that it’s ‘really dangerous to remove Universal Credit payments at this moment in time, it’s brutal’.

He said: “I trust the population of this country, I work on the theory that people aren’t sitting there lazy, they really want a good job. They want to get good pay, they want their mental health to be sorted.

“They’re not sitting there thinking, ‘I’m going to take the chancellors money and live off of their money for the next ten to fifteen years.”