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A thread to catalogue the eloquence, dignity, diplomacy and wisdom of Boris Johnson

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If it helps cement the reality that the Conservative Party is extraordinarily reckless, incompetent, corrupt, and culpable for the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands (which is obviously the truth of the matter), then it has been a good day.
 
It was obvious to me they were going for Herd by Stealth. The leak of easing of lockdown just before a heatwave VE celebration long weekend to all the meathead read Tabloids is at least one large piece of evidence along with Cheltenham etc etc
 
If it helps cement the reality that the Conservative Party is extraordinarily reckless, incompetent, corrupt, and culpable for the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands (which is obviously the truth of the matter), then it has been a good day.

the sad thing is, much of the electorate simply don't care.
 
Tories do as they wish,a mix of Labour giving up Scotland to the snp, arrogance in believing the north was theirs, and collapse of the libs has meant the electoral numbers will deliver the tories a automatic majority.
Think there’s more than a few senior tories who see the Scots independence as a political opportunity to ensure a Tory future.
 
Ps, that twat clegg destroyed the liberal dems, and should never be given a job, full stop.
Arrogant toe rag has dumped a Tory future on us all, a future in which as they say (the) ‘opposition is futile’
Reason Bojo so cheerful is he’s virtually bulletproof, like trump his party has to support him or suffer consequences. Therefore as a one party state we go on.
 
Martin Rowson on Boris Johnson hosting Viktor Orbán at No 10 – cartoon

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https://www.theguardian.com/comment...johnson-hosting-viktor-orban-at-no-10-cartoon

Odious meets Odious.
 
An interesting read (and the right take IMO) from Ian Leslies blog re: the Cummings blow up and what it says about Spaffer's government.


DOM BOMB
Speaking of ranters. This week the Prime Minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings gave evidence to a parliamentary committee on the government’s handling of the pandemic during 2020. Over the course of seven hours, he described in unsparing detail how the whole government failed to get to grips with the impending crisis early in 2020 and then scrambled to catch up, impeded by a hapless Prime Minister. Thoughts:

  • That was astonishing testimony. I think it was probably unprecedented and not just in terms of parliamentary evidence. Can you think of any major organisational screw-up in which a leading player so eagerly detailed his own failings, as well as those of his former colleagues? This was not “mistakes were made”. This was a rare example of someone saying, “I screwed up. I was not up to the task. I shouldn’t have been there.” He was right on all counts, more so than he knows, but we should at least give him credit for emphatically admitting culpability and for apologising to those affected, which he did repeatedly and to my eyes sincerely - I think he really feels the burden of it. I didn’t get the sense of someone trying to save face or thinking about his next job (he knows very well he’ll never work in government again). He really did want to put it all out there, almost as penance.

  • He performed a few drive-bys while he was at it. Since he couldn’t help but snipe at targets and push favourites, much of the coverage has understandably been about individuals. But what was really fascinating about Cummings’s testimony was the portrait it painted of wider failures. In his best moments he described a system and its senior decision-makers failing each other. The reason his evidence on this front was so compelling is not because his analysis of the British state’s problems is original or that his solutions are viable (at one point he suggested that in the next crisis a scientist should be given “kingly authority”- um, no), it’s that he is such a good storyteller. I’ve never seen someone narrate, in such colour, the experience of being at the centre of a government as it wakes up to the awful truth that a storm has hit and it doesn’t have a clue what to do. The vignette of a senior civil servant walking into to see him and the PM to say, “We’re ****ed. There is no plan,” was unforgettable. His imagery - the spidermen, the shopping trolley - is vivid. There are clear cut heroes and villains. His delivery is magnetic - he made everyone else in the room seem pale and drab to the point of invisibility. The storytelling has public value, in this context. It is one thing to read weighty papers proposing civil service reform; it’s quite another to convey a feel for what it’s like to be inside the system, at its centre, as things slide out of control. So I think the narration was an important aspect of his testimony. It made the abstract idea of system failure feel horribly real.

  • That civil servant acted heroically. It takes guts to go and tell the Prime Minister the bad news to his face when everyone else is pretending the emperor’s clothes look just fine. It’s interesting that it took someone prepared to dispense with niceties for things to change. Direct, forceful speech seems to be a rarity in government, even in a crisis. Not once did Cummings describe a meeting in which people actually spoke their minds and challenged and argued in the room. The meetings seem to have been polite and dutiful and and pointless, with everyone deferring to “the science” even as we all read about people dying in Italian hospitals. Dissenting opinions were confined to corridors and WhatsApp chats. That allowed a zombie consensus about the nature of the pandemic to sustain itself way beyond the point at which anyone believed in it.

  • Cummings was remarkably open and, to my eyes, honest, yet it’s also true that he is a somewhat unreliable witness to reality. He spoke about the system failures of No.10 as if he was altogether detached from them. But if there was nobody exerting authority, no clear lines of command, that was in large part his fault. That was the missing mea culpa (he did, to be fair, begin to correct for it in the autumn by installing a Covid task force at No.10). He takes responsibility but does not fully grasp his own part in the failure.

  • His account of the Barnard Castle trip was a hot mess: melodramatic, confusing and self-contradictory. This was not, I don’t think, because he was trying to “hide the truth”, but because he was experiencing his own internal system fail. What seems to have happened last May is that he basically went a bit mad, and understandably so: he was under immense psychological pressure, intensely aware that he had screwed up on a massive scale, feeling horribly out of his depth, and worried about his family. I suspect he’s still in a kind of post-traumatic phase from the whole year, which is why watching him on Wednesday sometimes felt uncomfortably like being a voyeur at a therapy session.

  • Once someone goes through his testimony carefully I suspect they will find quite a few instances where what he said is misleading or just false. It’s not that he’s lying. I don’t know quite what it is, but something in the way his mind works means he doesn’t see things straight - I mean, even more so than most of us. It’s ironic that he is a fan of rationalists like Julia Galef, because his temperament and cognitive style is obviously at odds with their’s, evident in his writing as well as his speech (for one thing rationalists do not hit the caps key with such abandon; they don’t rant). Perhaps the talent for narration and the deeply skewed take on reality are two sides of the same coin. He lives inside his stories.

  • Cummings is reputed to be brilliant but difficult, yet when it comes to governing he is plainly incompetent and difficult; incapable of the basics, like running meetings, shaping processes, building alliances, finding workable compromises; dealing with people as they are not as characters in a play. He seemed to spend most of 2020 avoiding real responsibility and searching out distractions. Yes, the pandemic exposed pre-existing system failures, the principal one being a failure to properly interrogate the pandemic plan that wasn’t. But those failures were exacerbated by the fact that Cummings was the wrong man at the wrong time - which of course applies even more so to the man who put him there. As one official put it to me yesterday, “The system and officials can probably cope if you have a duff PM, but it can’t cope if both the PM and their most powerful adviser are incapable.”
 
you do wonder what hold BJ has over the Pope to get permission to marry for a 3rd time in the highest of high RC churches.

I also think that we should see a photo of all the page boys, esp the blonde, tussled haired ones ;)
 
The photos sold to "Hello"? How else can he afford it. Meanwhile the denials of culpability for the deaths of thousands in care homes just get thinner.
 
you do wonder what hold BJ has over the Pope to get permission to marry for a 3rd time in the highest of high RC churches.

I also think that we should see a photo of all the page boys, esp the blonde, tussled haired ones ;)

Typical religious fudge: the previous 2 marriages were not 'sacramental'. Therefore they didn't happen !
 
Typical religious fudge: the previous 2 marriages were not 'sacramental'. Therefore they didn't happen !

Yes it is utter hyocritical bollocks, so quite a good fit for Johnson. Presumably all his kids, even the ones he's owned up to are now illegitimate.
 
The pics give the impression the reception was held inside the No.10 bunker. Was it in the pokey flat or did they have the buffet put out on the Cabinet room table then the disco in the new Russian built press briefing room? Keep an eye out for sagging helium balloons hovering on the ceiling next time he’s giving a Covid briefing.
 
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