What is 'Party Gate Scandal of United Kingdom' ? It is

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Relates to flouting of Covid-19 norms by British P.M.'s Office. 'Partygate' was the row over social gatherings held at 10 Downing Street and elsewhere in Whitehall by government and Conservative Party staff during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 — while the same government was telling the country it could not attend funerals or visit dying relatives. The gatherings were investigated by the senior civil servant Sue Gray, whose interim update appeared on 31 January 2022 and whose final report was laid before Parliament on 25 May 2022, a fortnight before this exam. Separately, the Metropolitan Police ran Operation Hillman and issued 126 fixed penalty notices to 83 people, among them Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Carrie Johnson and the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Johnson was fined in April 2022, making him the first serving British Prime Minister sanctioned for breaking the law. Note the wording of the name, because it is the whole trap: 'party' here means a social party, not a political party, and the affair concerned the Prime Minister's own office. As of the June-2022 exam Johnson was still in office; he resigned as Prime Minister in July 2022, a few weeks after candidates sat this paper.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Names the right party but the wrong offence. Partygate was about breaches of the government's own public-health regulations — a matter for a civil-service inquiry and for police fixed penalty notices under Covid rules — not about any abuse of democratic norms or institutions.  (c) The misreading the name is designed to invite. 'Party' in Partygate refers to gatherings, not to political parties, and no part of the affair concerned campaign funding or the United States.  (d) Wrong party and wrong setting. The gatherings were held by staff of the Conservative government at Downing Street and in Whitehall, not by the Labour opposition, and the issue was lockdown regulations rather than conduct in Parliament.

Concept: Partygate is a case study in political accountability under emergency regulation. When a government legislates restrictions on the whole population, its own compliance becomes a test of legitimacy — the objection was less that a few drinks were had than that the people writing the rules exempted themselves from them. Two separate accountability tracks ran in parallel: an internal civil-service inquiry into what happened, and a criminal-law process under the Covid regulations themselves.

State PCS 2022 Q15 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q15 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer