The format the report will take remains unclear, but fears have arisen that significant swathes could be redacted to protect the identity of officials, although Number 10 has said it will be published in full.

Bob Blackman, a senior Tory MP and the executive secretary of the 1922 Committee, said: “We need to get to the bottom of all these activities in Number 10.”

Arguing that the “vast majority” of attendees at any event in Downing Street are likely to have been civil servants, he said: “What happens to them, will they be disciplined?”.

He urged Number 10 to commit to publishing the names of senior officials involved rather than redacting them, arguing that it would make it more likely that “there may then follow disciplinary action”.

His intervention was echoed by Lee Anderson, a “Red Wall” Tory MP, who declared that the inquiry must be published in its entirety: “Of course the whole country would want to see the report. We can’t have things done behind closed doors; there would be no point to the report.”

He warned he “would hope they [Number 10] wouldn’t” redact names of people potentially involved in wrongdoing “unless anyone is at significant risk of harm”.

“At the end of the day, these people are at work. If they’ve done something, if they are part of that inquiry, you can’t have ‘Mrs X’ or ‘Mr A’ or ‘Mr B’ [instead of real names]. These people are paid by the taxpayer,” he said.

Mr Anderson added that he was referring specifically to “senior people who should know better” than to break Covid rules, and did not believe that junior officials should be “named and shamed”.

Boris ‘unlikely to recover’

It came as a polling expert predicted that the Prime Minister is unlikely to recover fully from the row engulfing him over Downing Street parties.

Sir John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, highlighted polling suggesting that a majority of voters who backed the Conservatives at the last election now disapproved of Mr Johnson’s performance.

The polling expert told Times Radio that Tory MPs “have to ask themselves whether or not the Prime Minister is likely to recover from a situation where around a half of the people who voted for him thinks he should go”.

Steve Baker, a longstanding critic of Mr Johnson over lockdown policies, told Sky News he thought his constituents “may be too angry to forgive” the Prime Minister over the party allegations. He said local voters in his Wycombe seat were “absolutely furious”.

His warnings dovetailed with a defence of the Prime Minister by the Education Secretary, who insisted Mr Johnson had got the “big calls” right.

Nadhim Zahawi said: “Whether it’s Brexit, the vaccine programme which the Prime Minister very much focused on and I led the deployment, and of course the call on omicron pre-Christmas… on the big decisions, he’s made the right call.”

He added: “Of course, we’re all human, we make mistakes. And when he made a mistake, he came to Parliament and apologised for it.”