Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[IrishBhoy]

3 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

The key thing is whether the British public have sunk to that level.

I've got a wee bit of faith that we're not quite there yet.

I must say I’m heartened by the reaction to Johnsons briefing earlier. Hopefully you are correct. 

[Alan Stubbs]

The absolute beamer that Johnson and co have been willing to take for Cummings is a much more interesting story to me than the trip itself. Confirmation (that wasn't particularly needed) that Cummings runs that Government. I'd love to know what he has on BoJo.

Went to have a wee nibble on the 4/1 or whatever it was on Cummings to go, after seeing this stuff about further sightings of him in Durham and the Tory papers turning on them. 

Down to 5/4  

[GAD]

People don't care and will forget about it by next week? I'm not sure about that. This isn't the same as shutting down parliament, or any of that other political shite. This is people who haven't seen family in months. People who have missed funerals, weddings, holidays, and everything else. Every single person in the country has been affected by this directly. They suffered and are now being made to look like fools. I don't think this will just wash away.

[IrishBhoy]

3 minutes ago, dundeefc1783 said:

1 hour ago, IrishBhoy said:

He’s a fucking imbecile. A few weeks ago he wanted anyone sitting in a park to get lifted. 
 
He wants things on the news that ‘lighten the mood’, maybe the BBC can try and find a water-skiing squirrel or a panda about to give birth. 

Maybe the news could lighten the mood by showing Aleksandr Usyk about knocking his fucking head off on repeat. I certainly don't tire of seeing it. Eddie Hearns reaction also raises a smile.

It’s a shame how fortunate he was to meet Haye when he did, with Hayes injury as well... and his World Title win was hardly top tier, but it’s unfortunately resulted in him retiring with a massively inflated ego where he believes he could have coped at the elite level of Cruiser and Heavy weight. 

[Arch Stanton]

Fuxake, Johnson and Cummings have turned the Daily Heil against the Tories.

[H Wragg]

The absolute beamer that Johnson and co have been willing to take for Cummings is a much more interesting story to me than the trip itself. Confirmation (that wasn't particularly needed) that Cummings runs that Government. I'd love to know what he has on BoJo.
Went to have a wee nibble on the 4/1 or whatever it was on Cummings to go, after seeing this stuff about further sightings of him in Durham and the Tory papers turning on them. 
Down to 5/4  

There does appear to be an outstanding sighting of him.

[RH33]

3 minutes ago, Arch Stanton said:

Fuxake, Johnson and Cummings have turned the Daily Heil against the Tories.

It’s all about the bants for those two #lads

[Arch Stanton]

[IrishBhoy]

2 minutes ago, GAD said:

People don't care and will forget about it by next week? I'm not sure about that. This isn't the same as shutting down parliament, or any of that other political shite. This is people who haven't seen family in months. People who have missed funerals, weddings, holidays, and everything else. Every single person in the country has been affected by this directly. They suffered and are now being made to look like fools. I don't think this will just wash away.

You’re right this just might be a bridge too far. Hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the allegations of corruption during the Brexit referendum, the dodgy financial dealings of Vote Leave, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the refusal to release the Russia report before the election, Priti Patel directing money to the IDF and taking part in off the record meetings while in government etc etc etc. 

[Donathan]

In terms of the next general election Johnson won’t give a shit about who wins it. He’s got the gig and couldn’t give a f**k about what happens beyond it.

Boris will probably call it a day before 2024, most likely through choice although there’s a non-zero chance that the men in grey suits pay him a visit if it turns into all out war between Cummings and the Tory backbenchers. There will be a leadership contest involving:

- Gove as the continuity candidate

- Sunak as the other continuity candidate

- Hunt as the candidate who doesn’t have his reputation tainted by the disaster that the government’s handling of covid will be viewed as

- Possibly Matt Hancock although I have a feeling his reputation is now damaged beyond repair

[Distant Doonhamer]

There does appear to be an outstanding sighting of him.

Yep previously discussed on here. Again no solid “proof”.

[GAD]

8 minutes ago, IrishBhoy said:

You’re right this just might be a bridge too far. Hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the allegations of corruption during the Brexit referendum, the dodgy financial dealings of Vote Leave, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the refusal to release the Russia report before the election, Priti Patel directing money to the IDF and taking part in off the record meetings while in government etc etc etc. 

Yeah, I think stuff like that, if you are into it can seem like a big deal, but most people just don't really care. However, it's not just people who take an interest in politics that are talking about this, it's everyone. I think folk are pretty angry to be honest. 

[Distant Doonhamer]

 

Boris will probably call it a day before 2024, most likely through choice although there’s a non-zero chance that the men in grey suits pay him a visit if it turns into all out war between Cummings and the Tory backbenchers. There will be a leadership contest involving:

 

- Gove as the continuity candidate

 

- Sunak as the other continuity candidate

 

- Hunt as the candidate who doesn’t have his reputation tainted by the disaster that the government’s handling of covid will be viewed as

 

- Possibly Matt Hancock although I have a feeling his reputation is now damaged beyond repair

Cummings is Gove’s boy. Hunt has been very quiet thus far and is presumably playing the long game here. Hancock is an idiot so not to be ruled out. Sunak has been less disastrous than most of the others in the cabinet so probably still has some support.

[Arch Stanton]

29 minutes ago, IrishBhoy said:

You’re right this just might be a bridge too far. Hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the allegations of corruption during the Brexit referendum, the dodgy financial dealings of Vote Leave, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the refusal to release the Russia report before the election, Priti Patel directing money to the IDF and taking part in off the record meetings while in government etc etc etc. 

Yeah but this isn't some policy which only affects those "up norf", "immigrunts"  or "jockoland".

Close to 50k people have died all over the UK and 100s of 1000s of people will have been affected by this yet would have been following the Govt rules.

What we now have is a betrayal of trust. The Govt saying this is all for the common good, 60 million people getting on board and yet defending one of their own for flouting those same rules.

[Florentine_Pogen]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/24/no-dignity-no-future-boris-forsakes-leadership-to-protect-cummings

Look on the bright side: at least we’ve had it confirmed who is actually running the country these days. And it isn’t the prime minister. Boris Johnson is no more than Dominic Cummings’s sock-puppet. A fairly shabby one at that. The reality is that without Classic Dom, there could be no Boris. All that Boris really amounts to is a parasitical ball of compromised ambition fuelled by a viral overload of neediness and cowardice. There is no substance or dignity left within the prime minister. His only instinct is his own survival.

The equation was quite simple. If Dom was to be fired, then Boris would have to fire himself, because it is inconceivable that the ersatz prime minister didn’t know the de facto prime minister had broken the lockdown rules by doing a runner to Durham. But just in case Boris had been in any doubt, Dom had arrived at Downing Street four hours before the daily coronavirus press conference to remind him who was boss. There were to be no sackings and no resignations. Not yet anyway. There may be in the days to come.

Not that Boris had actually wanted to front up the No 10 briefing. It was just that every other cabinet minister had phoned in to say they were self-isolating in their second homes. Or in Robert Jenrick’s case, his third home.

Right from the off, Boris had looked rattled. The self-styled great communicator has lost the power of language and can now only talk in staccato bursts of incomprehensible Morse code. Even more disastrously, he is the populist politician who has lost track of the mood of the people. His survival skills have deserted him. The country is spitting blood at the arrogance of one rule for the elite and another for the rest, and Boris is totally oblivious.

Breathless and pasty-faced, his eyes still bloodshot after his talking-to by Dom, Boris leapt to his boss’s defence. He hadn’t been able to throw a protective ring around care homes, but he sure as hell was going to throw one round Cummings. Classic Dom had done nothing wrong at all. In fact, he had done what any father would do and drive to his second home. Mostly because he was so short of friends that he had no one within a 260-mile radius who could leave food parcels for his child. Oddly, that was one of the few statements that sounded vaguely convincing.

The rest of his opening remarks were incoherent drivel. Dom had driven the length of the country to escape the virus. Even though he was taking it with him in the car and almost certainly contracted it during the enclosed proximity to his wife. It was as though Boris thought the virus could only travel at 50 mph, so if Dom drove at 70mph up the M1, then he could outrun it.

Dom had had no alternative. Indeed, if the de facto prime minister had a fault, it was that he loved his family too much. All those single mothers and workshy parents without second homes were basically heartless and uncaring for staying put and obeying the government advice on self-isolation. Dom: the man who loved too much.

Boris then wittered on a bit about schools – mysteriously, he seemed to forget the dualling of the A66 that Grant Shapps had been so desperate to talk about during the morning media round – but all the questions concentrated on how and how often Dom had chosen to arbitrarily break the rules. Here Boris started to get sweaty and petulant. He was standing by Dom and that was that. He didn’t have to give a credible reason because he was the World King who wrote all the rules.

Bizarrely, he even described Dom as responsible. Cummings won’t be at all happy about that. His whole self-image is based upon him being the great anti-establishment disruptor; the person to whom rules don’t apply. Not some establishment posh boy who toed the line at all times. God save the Queen! Her fascist regime.

Then Boris was unwittingly making sure that both he and Dom had no future. The press conference he had hoped would draw a line under Dom’s midnight – no toilet or snack breaks – flits to his hideout merely served to ensure they would dominate the news agenda for weeks. Boris had had a chance to show genuine leadership and completely flunked it.

He refused to answer any questions about whether he knew Dom had done a runner – just imagine Boris working from Downing Street imagining his host body was holed up in north London – or when he discovered that Dom was in Durham. Not because he didn’t know, but because he genuinely thought it didn’t matter. Boris is a true believer in his own exceptionalism, a trait that he graciously extends to those who are close to him. He genuinely doesn’t see a problem with not obeying a rule himself that he has asked the rest of the country to follow. So what if Dom and his family might have risked infecting a few dozen inconsequential little people? Sacrifice is what other, lesser people do. Nor was there even an attempt to answer the allegations about Dom’s other alleged extracurricular outings to Barnard Castle or the bluebell woods.

In saving Dom – for the time being at least – Boris had tossed away the credibility of his own government. He has been stripped bare and exposed as not very bright, lacking in judgment and completely amoral. Within an hour, he had not only defended the indefensible, he had basically told the nation they were free to do as they please. If there is a second coronavirus peak, Boris will have even more blood on his hands. He’d even made Shapps’s TV appearances look vaguely statesmanlike. That bad. At a time of national crisis, we have a prime minister who makes Henry Kissinger look worthy of a Nobel peace prize. Satire is now dead.

[IrishBhoy]

15 minutes ago, GAD said:

Yeah, I think stuff like that, if you are into it can seem like a big deal, but most people just don't really care. However, it's not just people who take an interest in politics that are talking about this, it's everyone. I think folk are pretty angry to be honest. 

To be fair I would agree. Due to the horribly incompetent way it has been dealt with, this story is now too big to be ignored by the wider population. That, added to the feeling of one rule for the elite and one for the rest of us, means it’s got a lot of people’s noses out of joint. Hopefully this is the breakwater where we use the over whelming public feeling to push back against this Tory government. 

[tamthebam]

Boris, being a lazy bugger and well known for not being a details person, needs Cummings to do his thinking for him so won't sack him.

Cummings has acted the cnut to the press, changing briefing venues, excluding certain journalists etc. He' s likely pissed off the Sir Humphreys by swanning about ordering the Civil Service about. The Tory backbenchers will either think he's "not one of us" or he'll have been arrogant to them at some time. Basically Cummings is like Julius Caesar in that there's a whole lot of people have been waiting for the Ides of March to come.

Blair (or Alastair Campbell) was so much better at handling this kind of thing. Mandelson and Blunkett would f**k up, resign, do their purgatory on the back benches for six months and come back to be welcomed like the prodigal son (and f**k up again)

[IrishBhoy]

2 minutes ago, Arch Stanton said:

Yeah but this isn't some policy which only affects those "up norf", "immigrunts"  or "jockoland".

Close to 50k people have died all over the UK and 100s of 1000s of people will have been affected by this yet would have been following the Govt rules.

What we now have is a betrayal of trust. The Govt saying this is all for the common good, 60 million people getting on board and yet defending one of their own for flouting those same rules.

Yep, as I  said I totally agree. I just truly hope it’s not something they can wriggle their way out of. It’s a situation where the general public can see in plain view that this government are willing to rewrite history at a time of great despair for millions of its people, in the hope it saves one mans job. 

[Gaz FFC]

24 minutes ago, GAD said:

Yeah, I think stuff like that, if you are into it can seem like a big deal, but most people just don't really care. However, it's not just people who take an interest in politics that are talking about this, it's everyone. I think folk are pretty angry to be honest. 

My Facebook feed is unbelievable. I've seen posts and comments from loads of people who usually ignore politics and don't even vote.

 

[HTG]

This has gone from something that an apology might have sorted to a point where it could finish Johnston. In the middle of a pandemic he's thrown everything around him under a bus. Obviously a lot of people would want and expect Cummings to go after Ferguson and Calderwood had to go but he might have squeezed through with "with hindsight it was a stupid thing to do". Johnston going baws oot to support him could see them both in the bin. He's pretty much fucked any containment strategy because the hordes who are champing at the bit will just use Cummings as their reason to go for it. 

It's probably not related but I went to Asda this afternoon and there was no attempt to manage the number of shoppers. Businesses who have lost fortunes will think "why the f**k should we take the hit on restricting footfall if this is the example at the top". 

An apology or quiet resignation and crack on. Now the whole thing is in tatters - or more tattered if you've looked at how this has been managed in England.