The Metropolitan Police will not publicly name any Downing Street staff who may receive fixed penalty notices as a result of their ongoing investigation into 12 gatherings in No 10 and Whitehall during Covid restrictions.

This means the public may not discover whether the prime minister himself, or his closest aides, are found to have criminally breached Covid restrictions.

This means that if No 10 does not indicate if the Prime Minister was fined or not, the public may never find out.

“As it has for all fixed penalty notices issued during the pandemic, the MPS will follow the College of Policing Approved Professional Practice for Media Relations which states that ‘identities of people dealt with by cautions, speeding fines and other fixed penalties – out-of-court disposals – should not be released or confirmed’,” a Met spokesperson confirmed this afternoon.

They went on: “Our approach during the pandemic has been to confirm the number of fixed penalty notices issued to people at particular events and to explain what those fixed penalty notices were issued for.”