‘We had two people over – then the police turned up’: how do Covid rule-breakers feel about partygate?

From the DJ fined 12,000 to the host of a small new year's gathering - the people who did get busted for breaking lockdown restrictions tell their stories

The knock on the door came just before midnight on New Year's Eve. Chloe Gardiner and her boyfriend were at home, but not alone. After a hard year, they had invited two friends over to see in 2021 with them, breaking strict rules in force in her area as the UK entered its second wave of the pandemic.

There were three carloads of police in the end," says Gardiner, a 23-year-old care assistant from the small town of Portstewart in Northern Ireland. And there were only four of us." It was hardly a wild party, she says - they were just hanging out, listening to music and posting the odd picture to social media - and she doesn't know who reported them; they weren't being loud, and they have no close neighbours. They were fined 200 each for breaching Covid regulations, deducted automatically in her case from her wages. Gardiner, who works two jobs, says money went from both pay packets, and she is still trying to recoup 100 she thinks was wrongly deducted in the confusion.