AN MP has criticised the Prime Minister for holding a birthday party while lockdown restrictions were in force.

Hove MP and shadow secretary for Northern Ireland Peter Kyle said that while a decorator who was spending £140,000 on Downing Street renovations was invited to a party, "in the outside world everyone was doing their bit".

Speaking to Sky News, Mr Kyle said that his dad celebrated his 80th birthday during the same lockdown.

He said: "I would have given my eyeteeth to have ten minutes with him. We had a Zoom meeting to celebrate his birthday [with] all of our family and he was alone at home.

"I'm sorry, but they stopped their work. They gathered, they brought in guests. They brought in his decorator to the party.

"They had cake which presumes that somebody went and got something, they organised it.

"This was a party, this was a celebration of somebody's birthday, when the rest of the county couldn't celebrate their birthdays, and the birthdays of the people they care about the most."

He said that while Russia is gearing up for an invasion of Ukraine, "the government is paralysed by what has been uncovered", and that things that were going wrong at the time of the first lockdown could have been avoided "if only they'd been focused in the right place".

Transport secretary Grant Shapps, however, suggested that the public would not consider the Prime Minister's gathering as a party.

Mr Shapps told BBC Breakfast: "I think most people would think of a party as being an arranged event rather than something where on somebody’s birthday in the office that they work in with the people that they always work with, someone says ‘it’s your birthday, here’s a cake’.

"But that is for Sue Gray to get to the bottom of, I do agree and understand why – not least from my own personal experience – this would cause upset."

Mr Shapps also said there were "so many other issues" to focus on, including the threat of a Russian invasion in Ukraine.

Mr Shapps said: "Those are the issues that we… that he is still focused on and the issues that we really should be focused on ourselves because things like that are really going to matter to our lives in a way that events of 20 months ago may not."

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