No one wants to talk about the pandemic anymore. Not even partygate. Understandably so: we’ve all put hard work into suppressing and burying miserable memories over that two-year period. Why dredge it all back up?

But as one of the people in this country who still deeply cares about partygate – the hypocrisy of it, the abuse of power – I simply want to say that today’s report from the Privileges Committee into whether Boris Johnson misled parliament is remarkable. It’s a delivery of justice that the Sue Gray report wasn’t: one which some of us have quietly been holding out for.

If you don’t have hours today to go through the full 30,000 words published on this inquiry and its findings, I’d highly recommend taking a look at pages 14 to 32. This is the breakdown of six specific gatherings, what happened at them, and what Boris Johnson can be assumed to have known at the time (he attended five of the six). It is methodical work. We are given exactly what the law was at the time. We are given exactly what ministers were telling the public to do in the days around these events. And then we are given more details than we’ve ever had before in one place, about the behaviour of those who were crafting and setting these laws.

We cannot erase what happened, what we were forced to do

It’s painful stuff for Johnson: his testimony to the committee is presented and countered with a host of evidence from other No.10 staff and officials, who often directly refuted Johnson’s claims that these parties were legal or within the guidance. This starts right from the beginning of the lockdown saga. The first party, on 20 May 2020 in the garden, is reported as obviously rule-breaking to the majority of invitees: ‘So many people who were unhappy about the party that they were not going to go,’ explaining why 40 people showed up from a 200-person invite list.

The supporting evidence only gets worse: ‘Wine time Fridays continued throughout’, ‘operational notes’ were sent around to ‘be mindful of the cameras outside the door.’ To say this doesn’t feel like fresh news would be exactly right. We witnessed all this first hand back in 2021 – ministers rolling into No.10 masked up, taking them off as soon as they were inside. We have known for years it was all for show – that the rules inside places like No.10, across Whitehall even, were different for everyone else.

Watch closely. Here’s Matt Hancock wears his mask outside in the fresh air, walking alone. But as he enters a communal area of No10, which is an office full of people, he rips it off his face.

The hypocrisy and lies need to stop! #Covid #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/EcEIRJXyLF

— Bernie’s Tweets (@BernieSpofforth) April 16, 2021

That’s not unique about today’s report. It’s not remarkable because of these extra little details about which we already suspected or knew: rather, it finally calls time on Johnson’s repeated insistence that this was all in the rules.

This has been the most egregious aspect of partygate: not that some MPs and their staff broke some rules (they were not easy to follow), but that the public has been told repeatedly that such behaviour was totally fine all along. If you were having a hard, if not impossible, time with lockdowns, you clearly misunderstood the rules. Drinks in the garden? Good to go, so long as you chat a bit about work. Leaving parties? ‘That is up to organisations,’ said Johnson, ‘to decide how they are going to implement the guidance.’ It was not up to organisations – it was not up to individuals – to make any of these decisions. They were made for us and monitored by the police.

We don’t need to dwell on the lockdowns: goodness knows the public’s mental health has been affected enough. But we cannot erase what happened, what we were forced to do, and Johnson’s attempt to defend himself politically has risked, for over a year now, doing just that. The public did not misinterpret the rules and give themselves harsher lockdowns than necessary. They understood the rules perfectly: so they saw no one, did nothing, cancelled life plans and steered clear of park benches.

And, it seems, Boris Johnson understood them too. He just didn’t think they applied to him and his people in the same way. As of today, that is less up for debate. Indeed, it’s now on the record.