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The report explores 16 gatherings that took place from May 2020 to April 2021, and, for the first time, lays out in stark detail the evidence of rule-breaking at the highest level of government in allowing questionable events to take place in Downing Street when the rest of Britain was under lockdown.

A pattern of booze-fueled parties at Downing Street was also described in the report — some that involved karaoke, music, and dozens of people — even as the public at large was being told not to gather with people from other households, including relatives. At the time, hospitals and nursing homes were also discouraging or prohibiting visitors, and funerals were allowed only with very limited attendance.

The details of the parties reflected what Ms. Gray’s inquiry called “failures of leadership and judgment in No. 10 and the Cabinet Office.” Photographs from the gatherings, along with emails, messages and accounts of the parties were also included in the report.

A party on June 18, 2020, at Downing Street and in the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall, for example, involved speeches, alcohol, food and music. At least one person got sick and there was at least one fight; the last member of staff didn’t leave until after 3 a.m.

That party, which took place in two stages, included more than 25 people who had gathered to say goodbye to a departing colleague and featured speeches in the Cabinet Room. Dominic Cummings, a special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson; and Simon Case, the permanent secretary for Covid and the pandemic response, attended that event.

A series of other parties, around Christmas 2020, also came under the spotlight, revealing instances of more drunkenness in government offices.

One of the parties, on Dec. 18, 2020, was an hourslong, planned event at the press office at Downing Street, with 20 to 45 people congregating to celebrate Christmas and the end of the year. The gathering included a Secret Santa game, an awards ceremony, alcohol and food. According to the report, “Some members of staff drank excessively. The event was crowded and noisy,” with staff members staying until after midnight. A cleaner cited in the report described red wine having been spilled on the floor.

At the time, gatherings of two or more people from different households were prohibited. Weeks later, on Jan. 14, 2021, while the same restrictions were in place, a goodbye event for two officials at Downing Street took place. It involved alcohol, and Mr. Johnson attended for a short time to give a speech, while others stayed late into the evening.

Two more gatherings were held at Downing Street on April 16. At that time, restrictions had slightly eased but nonwork gatherings of two or more households indoors or six outdoors were still prohibited. Both events lasted for hours, the report said, with senior officials attending, though Mr. Johnson was not there.

“A number of those present drank excessively,” the report added. After more than 20 people moved outside, still drinking, they damaged a child’s play set, and the last staff members left after 4 a.m.

Emails and messages detailed in the report showed that some people had expressed reservations about gathering while the restrictions were in force. But others seemed to simply ignore the warnings as they exchanged invitations to the parties.

The report included a series of emails sent before a gathering on May 20, 2020, organized by officials to bolster morale and attended by 30 to 40 members of staff in the garden of 10 Downing Street.

Lee Cain, who was then the director of communications for Mr. Johnson’s office, received an invitation and sent a response back to other officials saying, “I’m sure it will be fine — and I applaud the gesture — but a 200 odd person invitation for drinks in the garden of no 10 is somewhat of a comms risk in the current environment.” According to the report, his concerns and those raised by other senior members of staff were ignored.

Mr. Johnson attended the May 20 party for about 30 minutes, the report said. Later, his principal private secretary at the time, Martin Reynolds, texted another adviser in a message about the news media that read, “better than them focusing on our drinks (which we seem to have got away with).”

The Jaffa school offered an interpretation of American history that might be described as Inception, Consummation and Corruption. Its Great Consummator was Lincoln, who restored the promise of the founding by fully establishing the “all men are created equal” absolutism of the Declaration of Independence. Its villains were John C. Calhoun and the progressives of the early 20th century, the former for defending slavery and inequality, the latter for replacing a constitutional republic with a bureaucratized administrative state, and both for displaying a philosophical and moral relativism that Jaffa despised (and that, as his intellectual feuds multiplied, he claimed to discern in many of his fellow conservatives as well).

But one thing you noticed hanging around with Claremont folks was that while they were obviously interested in the good and bad of each American regime change, from the original founding (great) to the Lincolnian re-founding (even better) to the progressive re-foundings of Woodrow Wilson (their great villain, the “Lost Cause” sympathizer turned arrogant technocrat) and Franklin Roosevelt, they were also just really interested in the idea of founding itself, when moments of crisis bring new orders out of old ones.

At one point, as a break from reading founding-era texts, we were treated to a screening of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the great John Ford western whose theme is the Old West’s transition into political modernity, passing from the rule of the gun (embodied by John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon) to the rule of the lawbook (embodied by Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard).

In the movie, the transition can’t happen without a dose of chaos, a mixture of violence and deception. Lee Marvin’s outlaw, Valance, challenges the peaceable lawyer Stoddard to a duel; Doniphon saves the lawyer by shooting the outlaw from the shadows — and then the killing is mistakenly attributed to Stewart’s character, who is lionized for it and goes on to be a great statesman of the New West while the cowboy and his vigilante code recede.

The not-so-subtle implication of the Claremont reading of American history is that this kind of fraught transition doesn’t happen once and for all; rather, it happens periodically within the life of any nation or society. Whenever change or crisis overwhelms one political order, one version of (in our case) the American republic, you get a period of instability and rough power politics, until the new era or the new settlement is forged.

But it doesn’t happen without moments like Doniphon shooting Valance — or Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, say, or Roosevelt threatening to pack the Supreme Court — when norms and niceties need to be suspended for the sake of the new system that’s waiting to be born.

When I try to understand what Eastman imagined himself doing in serving Donald Trump even unto constitutional crisis, this is where my speculations turn. I don’t think this is the necessary implication of Claremont thought; indeed, you can find in the latest issue of The Claremont Review of Books an essay by William Voegeli critiquing conservatives who seem “enthused about chaos” and overeager to re-found rather than conserve. But I think it’s an understandable place for the Claremont reading of American history to turn at a time when the American republic does appear sclerotic, stalemated, gridlocked and in need of some kind of conspicuous renewal.