Tory peer quits as justice minister over Covid breaches at No 10

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

A Conservative peer has quit as justice minister over the breaches of Covid rules in Downing Street It comes after Boris Johnson was fined on Tuesday for attending a lockdown party.

Lord David Wolfson said in a letter the “repeated rule-breaking, and breaches of the criminal law” at No 10 had caused him to submit his resignation as justice minister.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, the Conservative peer said: “Justice may often be a matter of courts and procedure, but the rule of law is something else – a constitutional principle which, at its root, means that everyone in a state, and indeed the state itself, is subject to the law. READ MORE: Student loan interest rates set to soar - what the changes mean for your repayments “I regret that recent disclosures lead to the inevitable conclusion that there was repeated rule-breaking, and breaches of the criminal law, in Downing Street.

I have – again, with considerable regret – come to the conclusion that the scale, context and nature of those breaches mean that it would be inconsistent with the rule of law for that conduct to pass with constitutional impunity, especially when many in society complied with the rules at great personal cost, and others were fined or prosecuted for similar, and sometimes apparently more trivial, offences. “It is not just a question of what happened in Downing Street, or your own conduct.