The office of Wiltshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner is locking down its Twitter account after it retweeted comments from a Conservative MP defending the Prime Minister over the partygate scandal.
The account, run by employees of Wiltshire and Swindon’s PCC Philip Wilkinson, shared a tweet from BBC correspondent Nikki Fox, who reported that Tory MP Richard Bacon had suggested some NHS staff also let “their hair down” during lockdown.
He was defending Boris Johnson after a report from senior civil servant Sue Gray found that many gatherings “should not have been allowed” and had the approval of senior figures.
There have been widespread calls for Mr Johnson to resign after news emerged that several parties took place in Downing Street during lockdown restrictions, and they strengthened after he, his wife Carrie and the Chancellor Rishi Sunak were fined for one of those events last month.
The tweet was retweeted by the PCC’s office (OPCC) on Wednesday evening, the day the Sue Gray report was published. But by the following morning, the retweet had been deleted.
And a spokesperson for the OPCC confirmed to this newspaper that they “cannot find a trace of this tweet” and have “further restricted” access to their Twitter accounts as a result.
The spokesperson added: “The OPCC’s social accounts are run by a team of people and, after checking our content management system, we cannot find any trace of this tweet nor any knowledge within the team of this.
“As a result, we have now changed all passwords and further restricted access to our accounts. We take our political impartiality extremely seriously and this social media share isn’t a reflection of any held views within the office or that of the Police and Crime Commissioner.”
Whilst the PCC, Mr Wilkinson, was elected last year as a Conservative candidate, his office is meant to be politically neutral.
In the interview with BBC Look East, Mr Bacon said: “You haven’t gone and investigated it but there are 1.5 million people who work in the NHS, I bet if you tried hard enough you could find some people letting their hair down who were working 24/7 in the NHS as well.”
He went on to say it was a “particular mistake” that people were stopped from seeing their loved ones before they died, especially in care homes.
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