According to this morning’s papers, Boris is to blame for Britain’s huge winter death toll from COVID-19. The reason? According to the Daily Mail‘s “sources”, i.e. Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister stubbornly resisted the advice of SAGE to impose a two-week ‘circuit breaker’ last autumn – which would have nipped rising infections in the bud, or something – instead introducing the tier system as a compromise. But he eventually caved in to pressure at the end of October after he was bullied into imposing a second lockdown by Matt Hancock, Michael Gove, Rishi Sunak, Dominic Cummings, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty. As he reluctantly agreed, the Prime Minister is alleged (by Dom) to have ruled out a third lockdown, saying: “No more ****ing lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”
Here’s Dom’s version of history, via the Mail, which recasts Boris as a liberty-loving lockdown sceptic.
The Prime Minister found himself outgunned when Mr Gove and Health Secretary Matt Hancock led the demand for a new clampdown on the disease.
Earlier in the pandemic, he had been supported by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who warned of the dire economic consequences of national lockdowns.
By October, Mr Sunak had moved closer to the stance of Mr Gove and Mr Hancock. Chief medical officer Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance strongly backed the position of Mr Gove and Mr Hancock.
A well-placed source said: “The PM hates the idea of lockdowns. He kept saying ‘there’s no evidence they even work’ and that ‘it goes against everything I’ve stood for’. But he was outnumbered – and ended up sitting in sullen silence as the others told him he had no choice.”
The tipping point reportedly came after a passionate speech by Mr Gove at a meeting with Mr Johnson and senior ministers.
“Michael said that if he didn’t impose a second lockdown there would be a catastrophe,” a source close to Mr Gove said.
“Hospitals would be over-run, people would be turned away from A&E and people would be dying in hospital corridors and hospital car parks.
“He told the PM he would have to send soldiers into hospitals to keep people out.
“TV film of that would be beamed around the globe. Was that the image of his post-Brexit Britain he wanted the world to see? It was devastating. The PM had no answer.”
Insiders say that from that point Mr Johnson “gave in to the inevitable” – and agreed to a second lockdown. But he also made it clear that it was to be the last, and under no circumstances world he agree to a third lockdown.
One said: “You have to understand how difficult this has been for the PM. The free spirit libertarian and journalist mischief maker in him wanted to join the lockdown sceptics revolt. But faced with being told by his Cabinet and experts that he would be held responsible for tens of thousands of deaths he knew he had no choice.”
The problem with this attempt to smear Boris is that it takes it for granted that he was wrong to rule out a ‘circuit breaker’ in the autumn and wrong to resist the pressure from the lockdown hawks surrounding him to impose a second lockdown in November. In fact, he was right on both counts.
First, let’s deal with the canard that a ‘circuit breaker’ in the autumn would have nipped surging infections in the bud, thereby massively reducing the ‘second wave’ death toll.
The argument relies on a counter-factual – a claim about what would have happened if Boris had done SAGE’s bidding. Counter-factuals are usually difficult to falsify, but not in this case because we have a ‘control’ in the form of Wales which imposed a ‘fire break’ lockdown from October 23rd to November 9th. In spite of this, the trajectory of confirmed cases in Wales, on a per capita basis, was almost identical to that of England.
What about the claim that Boris was wrong to resist the pressure to impose a second lockdown in November? It’s become conventional wisdom that cases in England only started to fall after the second lockdown was imposed. But as Edinburgh University Professor Simon Woods pointed out in a paper for Biometrics, infections were falling before all three lockdowns were imposed, including the second. Instead of relying on the modelling produced by Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College – one of the models that SAGE based its projections and recommendations on and which no doubt informed the views of the lockdown hawks in their showdown with Boris, including Gove’s hyperbolic ‘soldiers in hospitals’ claim – Woods estimated the daily number of new fatal infections from the data on daily deaths and fatal disease duration. He summarised his findings in a recent article in the Spectator:
Before the second lockdown it was argued that the tier system was ineffective and that cases were surging. But the reconstructions suggest that fatal infections — and by implication Covid infections generally — were not surging. They were in decline having peaked earlier.
Here’s the model produced by Simon Woods and his colleague Ernst Wit, with whom he wrote another paper that came to the same conclusion. It shows that the R was below one, and hence infection levels were falling (in most regions and in total), before the second lockdown.
As the model shows, far from the restrictions introduced in the second lockdown causing infections to fall, they were already falling before the lockdown was imposed. In other words, Boris was right to resist calls to ratchet up the ‘tier system’ his Government had introduced in October and the hawks surrounding him in Downing Street were wrong.
There’s one more piece of evidence to suggest Boris was right to resist a ‘circuit breaker’ and right to push back against SAGE’s religious-like attachment to Ferguson’s modelling – Sweden. Sweden didn’t impose a ‘fire break’ last autumn or a lockdown last winter, yet its trajectory of Covid deaths per million is remarkably similar to the U.K’s, as can be seen in the graph below.
It’s also worth pointing out – for the thousandth time – that in spite of not locking down for the whole of 2020 Sweden experienced fewer Covid deaths per million than most European countries, including the U.K. That suggests that the models the lockdown hawks were basing their prognoses of doom on were wrong and had Boris stuck to his guns and resisted their scaremongering, as the Swedish Prime Minister did, the U.K. would not have experienced an even more deadly ‘second wave’. The Swedish example shows that lockdowns don’t appear to do anything to reduce Covid deaths. When Boris said “there’s no evidence they even work” he was spot on.
One final point: the Telegraph reports that Cummings is planning to blame Boris for the U.K.’s failure to close its borders at the beginning of the pandemic when he testifies before a House of Commons select committee next month.
Dominic Cummings will accuse Boris Johnson of blocking plans to close Britain’s borders and putting lives at risk by failing to prevent the spread of Covid from abroad early in the pandemic.
Cummings may well be right that closing Britain’s borders in January of last year, particularly to travellers from China, would have been sensible. It certainly seems to have contributed to Taiwan’s astonishingly low death toll in spite of Taiwan never having imposed a lockdown. But he’s wrong to blame Boris for this omission. As I pointed out on Lockdown Sceptics in May of last year, when the British Government decided not to impose port-of-entry screening it was following the advice of the Newly Emerging Respiratory Virus Advisory Group (NERVTAG).
The Department of Health and Social Care asked NERVTAG to hold a meeting to consider the need for port-of entry screening in January and one was duly convened on January 13th chaired by Peter Horby, an Oxford professor with links to the World Health Organisation. At that point, seven other countries had introduced temperature screening at airports for visitors from Wuhan, the centre of the viral outbreak in Hubei. The NERVTAG recommendation was that there would be no point in doing this if exit screening at Wuhan airports was already taking place, although they had no evidence it was.
At the next NERVTAG meeting on January 21st, this one attended by Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer of England, and his deputy Jonathan Van-Tam, the boffins were asked to reconsider the question, but again they passed the buck to the Chinese authorities. By now, human-to-human transmission had been confirmed, i.e. China’s attempt to cover-up the outbreak had been exposed and greater doubt should have been cast on any information coming out of the Communist dictatorship. Nonetheless, NERVTAG’s response was the same: “Neil Ferguson noted that from the modelling perspective, with exit screening in place in China, effectiveness of port-of-entry screening in the UK would be low and potentially only detect those who were not sick before boarding but became sick during the flight. NERVTAG felt there was a lack of clarity on the exit screening process in Wuhan, although it was thought that this process would be robust, and statements had been released by Chinese authorities about stopping febrile passengers from travelling. However, as noted, there were no data on the implementation of this programme.” (Minutes of the NERVTAG Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Second Meeting: January 21st 2020)
A lack of clarity on the exit screening process in Wuhan?!? You can say that again. As I’ve flagged up before, the Chinese authorities cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China on January 23rd, two days after this NERVTAG meeting, but not from Hubei to the rest of the world, including the U.K. If the exit screening process in Wuhan was as “robust” as the boffins thought – if the Chinese authorities really were “stopping febrile passengers from travelling” – why was the process not good enough to prevent infection spreading to the rest of the country?
I’m basing all this on the minutes of the NERVTAG meetings which are available online here.
In short, Boris isn’t to blame for Britain’s failure to close its borders at the beginning of the pandemic last year – that would be Neil Ferguson, Chris Whitty and Jonathan Van-Tam – and he was quite right to hold out against an entirely pointless ‘circuit breaker’ last autumn and right, too, to fight against attempts to browbeat him into imposing a second lockdown in November. The only thing he did wrong was not to stick to his guns about imposing a third.
Stop Press: I got some of the data for the above argument from Phillip W. Magness’s excellent post for AIER in which he debunked the pro-lockdown conspiracy theory that the only reason Boris didn’t impose a ‘circuit breaker’ last autumn was because he fell under the spell of Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Anders Tegnell.
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Good Piece Toby.
Boris said no more lockdowns.
Boris said the only reason we’re not all dead is lockdowns.
??
Ah, I’ve just said the same thing at length. lol. I should have read the comments first, Annie. You make the point so much more succinctly as usual.
Note that Boris’s enemies think that their best line of attack is to suggest, rightly or wrongly, that he is anti-lockdown. Sheeple appeal!
Can you imagine Winston Churchill sitting in sullen silence while his advisors decide that he’s going to throw in the towel after Dunkirk, and go lick Hitler’s boots? That’s what a lot of his cabinet wanted at the time.
Opportunist liar who will say anything as and when it suits the situation.
Yes – very applicable to bozo and the cummings creature.
Boris or Dom? Fits either
Both.
Two liars fighting like cats in a sack
Or rats in a corner.
Yes. I find this description of Boris’s loathing of lockdowns difficult to equate with his recent statement that the fall in numbers in the U.K. is due to lockdowns. So is he still being ‘managed’ by the lockdown lovers in SAGE and the Cabinet? Surely at some stage he has to have the courage of his convictions and stand for what he believes in.
What, ‘bozo’ and ‘courage’ AND ‘believes in’ all in one comment???
Boris has no courage and no convictions. He believes only in Boris.
Quite, Toby says the suggestion that bozo tried to stop the second lockdown was a ‘smear’ against him but, if true, it would enhance his reputation amongst Sceptics and doubters.
As it is bozo scuppered that himself with his bizarre (and seemingly solitary) claim that it was his brilliant lockdowns that saw off the Covid rather than the vax (ignoring seasonality natch).
If poor Johnson was bullied by Gove and and the Wizards of SAGE into adopting lockdowns for which he said there is no evidence then why did he clearly say the other day that it was the lockdowns wot dunnit? Clearly signalling a repeat assault on the population in October. Seems like he is preparing an ‘I was only following orders’ defence for the trial to me, while assaulting the population anyway.
Either that or he’s a tripleplusgood doublethinker and record-breaking duckspeaker.
It’s Pure Panto. Toby, the arch Boris acolyte and alt-PR guru, paints DC’s intervention as ‘this attempt to smear Boris…’ As ever, he’s simply being a loyal Tory.
It’s not a smear but a transparent co-ordinated attempt to reinvent/rehabilitate the most draconian UK PM ever, as a libertarian – just in case this all goes t*ts up. Johnson is aware of the growing protests and scepticism, and presumably has orchestrated this latest chapter (with DC’s help) as a way of splitting the anger along party lines.
Johnson is quite happy with the idiots Starmer and Rayner banging on about decorating bills (he’s Teflon coated on such things), what he doesn’t want is for serious attention to fall on the damage lockdown has done to the UK: its economy, its people and its culture.
And that’s before we get onto under-reported deaths and injuries due to experimental gene therapy.
What a thickened plot!
Reeks of Gove and Hancock manoeuvring to remove Johnson, with Cummings as their von Stauffenberg. If Mr Johnson had any sense, he sack the first two and suspend them from the party, making them independent MPs, but of course, the country is to be the victim of all their narcissism.
Please don’t compare Cummings with Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg was a brave and honourable man.
More like the plotting around Stalin as he lay dying in a pool of his own piss; Malenkov or Moltov, the professional party politicians, should have got the gig; Lavrenty Beria the hitman expected it but got the chop from Zhukov the soldier.
Nikita Krushchev, the clown, got the job.
At the time Stalin died, pretty much the only thing the other leading Communists were agreed upon was that Beria was too dangerous to be left alive…
You’re PM; you’re surrounded by zealots Gove, Hancock, Vallance, Whitty, Cummings; you don’t want to Lockdown, but you fear resignations. What to do? Do the right thing, that is bring superbly qualified Lockdown sceptics inside the policy debate and have it out in public. If Gove, Hancock et al resign, such is life. Do the right thing and explain it. You’d have plenty of articulate helpers and children would be at school, businesses would be open and aid would be focussed on the vulnerable. That would mean standing up to the would-be tyrants in your face. It seems like that is Boris’s ultimate failing, cowardice in the face of proximate force. Dilyn has more balls (I hope) – he’d have pissed on their handmade leather shoes.
what debate? it is clear by now that NONE of this is about a virus – it might have been in the first 3 weeks last year when we were seeing the bogus chinese footage of people dying in the streets and the bogus pictures of bodies piles up in makeshift italian morgues, which have since turned out to be “recycled” from an earlier earthquake in Italy with a high death toll. But the “virus” was declared to be over last June was it – someone else can correct me – and we are now still destroying the economy, preventing foreign travel, bringing in vaccine passports in order to keep people “safe” which will then become the vector for the social credit system, and planning to vaccinate children and pregnant women, when the bulk of the country which might be susceptible [elderly, vulnerable] has already been vaccinated.
Correct, 2nd week of June 2020 when ONS stats showed less people dying in London than in the five year average.
It was all over by then but bozo ignored his second opportunity to call Covid over and become a National Treasure. tosser.
The only question for Sceptics then was WHY ?
Hancockwomble, in particular, is not suitable for any job in the known universe.
This is just nonsense, propaganda and shameless theatre they really do think people are stupid and unfortunately some are this gullible.
I’m afraid I do believe e 100% that our current PM was against lockdowns but is so weak that he caved. Too lazy to bring in experts on the other side of the argument and too scared that he might lose cabinet members. His failing is weakness and laziness. He is no leader, leaders say I hear what you are saying but I am in charge and this is what we are going to do.
Now we’ll have Johnson ousted because he didn’t go far enough, soon enough not for the reason that he went too far and wrecked the economy, mental health and all non-Covid health outcomes. Then we can brace ourselves for a Gove taking away our freedoms for ever.
What happened to the other members of cabinet who are supposed to have been in despair? Who are they and why don’t they speak up?
All career politicians of low calibre and zero integrity. I feel pretty low this morning regarding our chances of ever being free again.
With an 80 seat majority and a compliant Opposition what did he have to be scared of ?
Most people can just about remember the name of the PM, I doubt if many tears would have been shed after the departure of Gove and Hancock, still fewer for the loss of Whitty and Vallence.
I’m describing what I believe to be his character. Of course he could have stood up to them but that would have required qualities he does not have.
I certainly wouldn’t have missed any of the people you list at all!
Was it Charles Moore (his former editor at the Telegraph) who said that bozo always backs down in a crisis ?
Totally agree with your assessment of Boris and the snivelling and dangerous Gove
Gove is exceptionally dangerous, he described himself as a libertarian and, in the same interview, said the virus presented a Darwinian threat.
Gove is simply a third-rate scribbler with an inflated notion of his own intelligence and knowledge.
When you consider the low bar set by the present scribbler class, you can’t get much lower than that.
“ He is no leader,”
Well – anyone with a smattering of intelligence has known that for years.
But the category he fails spectacularly to fulfil is “proper human being”.
Yes, of course it’s theatre. Unfortunately, too many still believe the PM is the top honcho.
“According to the Daily Mail‘s “sources”, i.e. Dominic Cummings”
Pathetic Toby.
Any discussion about Cummings and what he did or didn’t say is a deliberate distraction from the main issues relating to lockdown.
As a narcissist, Johnson presents an ideal puppet for those whose minds are riddled with evil intent. Ego and self-interest of a few are driving this worldwide disaster, preying on the psychology of the easily-manipulated masses.
The whole pack of cards will crumble if the dreadful PCR test can be widely exposed as the foundation on which this fake pandemic is based. We must do all we can to support people like Reiner Fuellmich and his team of international lawyers. One of his recent interviews is here https://www.bitchute.com/video/umuyiFXjvTPe/.
Shutting down travel from China only would have been pointless (just as Trump’s China travel ban was), as wasn’t the UK seeded with Covid overwhelmingly from other European countries?
Travel bans are an all-or-nothing affair: to keep out a virus (or variant) you have to do what Australia and New Zealand did and impose 14-day quarantines on every person entering your country, regardless of origin or citizenship. And that imposes a huge restriction on the number of people you are able to accept, which is the reason why Australia and NZ are off-limits to almost anyone who isn’t already a citizen or permanent resident.
I strongly suspect that such a policy would have been (at least in January 2020) too much even for Nigel Farage, in part because the UK (even after Brexit) has much better relations with the European mainland than East Asian countries tend to have with one another, and also because the UK does most of its trade with Europe by trucks.
If you want to deliver a load of cargo from (let’s say) Poland to the UK, it makes most sense to have a truck take it all the way as the Channel crossing is only a very small part of the total journey. This was not the case for trade with Australia or NZ, meaning that they trade only by container ships or aircraft (which are both easily-quarantinable in a way that trucks are not).
Plus the isolation of Australia and NZ means that they’re almost impossible to travel to illegally: that isn’t the case for the UK as demonstrated by the illegal immigrants who cross the Channel in makeshift boats. If the UK had attempted an Australian-style border policy, how likely is it that British citizens would join those illegal immigrants rather than be stranded abroad for months as they waited for a quarantine hotel slot?
Agreed, but you will recall that the queue of 20,000(?) truckers stuck at Dover trying to get home for Xmas had to take compulsory tests but only a couple of dozen came up positive at a time when the rest of the country were contaminated at some ludicrous rate.
Fiddled in both instances of course.
Wasn’t the variant behind the awful December wave a home-grown one though, not an imported one?
Whichever variant was around in mid winter would have been associated with the rise in deaths, which happened at the traditional time.
I was on a plane from Italy in late January which was full of coughing Chinese.
Closing the borders was always futile for the UK, most definetely after the half term (ski) holidays in mid February had passed (see Stockholm).
Any idea why those “coughing Chinese” you refer to were on a flight from Italy to (presumably) the UK? I very much doubt they were the textile industry workers who seeded Italy in the first place…
Oh, and didn’t Stockholm import a lot of virus from the UK and New York City?
I was in Bangkok in January ’20 surrounded by very healthy Chinese from Wuhan.
Germany, Austria, Czechia&co instituted these earlier circuit breaker lockdowns.
Notice where it got them.
And again, there was no research taking place, just mindless imitation and panicking.
And as for closing the borders, Taiwan, Norway, NZ: yes, closing them early, meaning before the virus took hold with thousands, could have made sense (and was advised against by the WHO…), but only then, which for the UK would have been in January, was far too late for it and e.g. Sweden in March (halfterm ski holidays had passed), and, above all, those borders would have had to stay and will have to stay closed for good!
Otherwise: see Czechia, Poland&co.
I suspect the even more damaging WHO policy in the early weeks (which allowed the virus to explode out of control in Italy) was “only test people who have been to China recently”…
“When you wish upon a star …..”
Oh, goody, Toby’s love affair with Bozo still going strong then!
The Whigs they most certainly ain’t
The question this article prompts is this: why is the PM so surrounded by lockdown hawks in a supposedly libertarian party and why isn’t he accessing a much wider range of opinion?
Libertarian party? Lol.
Indeed. I suppose if you look at its history it has only really been libertarian for about 10 years in the 1980s. Unfortunately those are the years of Conservatism which are most prominent in my memory.
When was that? I must have missed it.
The fun game will be watching a Prime Minister who has claimed ‘it wuz lockdowns wot wun it’ defending himself against accusations that he delayed lockdowns against a backdrop of mounting and extremely convincing evidence that lockdowns are pointless.
Is this government, leader, in a bit of a muddle?
Should they be kicked out?
Do bears etc…….
Gove and Cummings effectively being the same political person, are they thinking the May elections may show less support for the Tories than polls suggest?
^^^^^^
THIS
is what it’s all about. Private polling. Tory vote going down the toilet in Tory areas.
I wish I could believe that were true, but I think in reality most Tory voters will continue to vote Tory because the vaccine thing has been a “success” and Labour voters will vote Labour because they hate the Tories and think we should have locked down earlier/harder/more efficiently.
I can seeing them doing ok in public sector-y, Remain-y smug self-satisfied Waitrosey type places. But doing very badly in more working class areas (e.g. the Red Wall which briefly became a Blue Wall at the last election). I also see Labour doing badly in those areas.
I hope all the mainstream parties do badly
#metoo.
I spoiled my ballot. Again.
Trouble is (and I know the feeling) – that is just a mark of frustration, not a real political choice.
I think many of us are faced with a real problem in voting now.
Yes, it is a futile gesture, only slightly less futile then not voting at all. But I cannot bring myself to support LibLabConGreen, which were the only options open to me. Electing any one of those parties would result in exactly the same policies we have today. Globalism. Control and power in the hands of Big Pharma, Big Tech, the 24 hour news media and a handful of global quangos. Eco-lunacy. Big, centralised, technocratic government. Diminishing democracy. Identity politics dividing us.
Down with that sort of ting.
‘Identity politics’ is a diversion, not a key issue.
The heart of the matter is popular complacency about political structures and institutions.
The irony is that many of those who wave the flag about ‘British’ virtues and history are quite happy to spit in the faces of those who stood against the sort of tyranny we are now facing, and left a legacy of principles, like the Nuremburg Protocols that they are now happy to see torn up.
Which is more effective on the ballot paper
‘None of the above’
‘Spoiled ballot’
‘Bunch of samey c*nts’ ?
The problem is – and what many fail to recognise – is that the ‘old’ political divisions have become irrelevant in this current situation of mass induced psychosis.
Both of the two major parties have been taken over by anti-democratic establishment interests and have a over-riding common agenda that is about the consolidation of elite power.
That leaves the ‘sideline’ parties – LibDems, Greens, UKIP etc etc flailing around on the periphery, but unable, for varying reasons, to create the sort of mass followings that are necessary to challenge the two major parties.
It’s ironic, since the fundamental issues of the proper functioning of a democratic state and its relationship to individual citizens has never been under greater challenge since WWII, with the consolidated establishment block focused on removing the very basics of democratic diversity and liberty under the cover of a fake emergency.
No. I don’t have any easy solutions that gets round a public perception shaped by a concerted propaganda campaign, although the common interests across the old boundaries that showed in the London march does provide a glimmer.
Yes, you are of course right, the old division of people into “left” and “right” no longer applies. The divide today is between the “globalist elitists” and the “patriotic democrats” – the people who think borders and nation states don’t matter and who think government should be by some “wise people” who know best versus the ones who think nation states bloody well do matter and that power should remain in the hands of ordinary voters.
I think the solution will ultimately be a party which unites the “working class left” of the Red Wall with the “Thatcherite right” represented by what once was Essex and Mondeo man. Despite the contradictions, they have more in common with each other than they do with the smug Blairite globalist centrists.
If Boris was the only leading politician in Government resisting lockdown, we are doomed. He has not handled the crisis well but he is not a mass murderer. What a vindicative little man Cummings has turned out to be and cynical. This was the man who cared so deeply about the effectiveness of lockdown that he made a little trip to the north to set an example to the rest of us. Who saved him then? I bet he regrets that decision bitterly.
“What a vindictive little man Cummings has turned out to be …”
You mean he wasn’t way back? I think you might have missed out on some crucial information!
The June reopening is essential for the Lockdown Cathedral. I predict that cases will be made to rise again sharply, sometime in the second half of June. Free tests for everyone is already a thing. Government will blame it on the people and their incessant need for freedom, and will plunge us into a new lockdown that will probably last all summer long at best, or until next April.
My money’s on them “allowing” us some freedom over summer, then rolling ut the flu vaccine early to produce another massive spike to justify a lockdown from October and over winter. More subtle but the same outcome.
Other than showing how dangerous psychopathic technocrats like Cummings can be, this is something of a distraction.
The buck stops with the PM, but many others must also take a share of the blame.
Johnson is a lying chancer. Lying chancers do not surround themselves with honourable people. Gove is a snake, presumably with something ‘on’ Johnson. The rest are second rate.
This article is pure politics. Its disgraceful how the bringing low of a society by lies is now used for political point scoring.
Shame on the individuals involved, shame on the media’s continuing mania for ‘personalities’ over substance.
This article should not have appeared, even though Mr Young is at liberty to post what he wants on hiis own blogsite, it demeans the stated reason for its existence.
Who in this cast list would you trust?
I can come up with only one single word all-embracing answer.
As to the naive idea that a country like the UK can effectively close its borders – that deserves another one-word retort.
“the naive idea that a country like the UK can effectively close its borders” Yes, look at how that’s going for NZ and Australia.
And yes, trust none of them, all culpable, to be honest don’t much care which of them are slightly more or less culpable than the others, all just a distraction from the real issues.
The number of MPs who come out of the last year well can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Charles Walker. Richard Drax. err… struggling now.
Desmond Swayne. There’s about 20-40 of them voting consistently in a sceptic manner now, though they started too late and are all madly pro-vax.
Thanks, yes, he deserves to be on the list.
Steve Baker? Graham Brady [at times]?
They are both paper tigers really, IMO. Baker in particular has been a big disappointment since he resigned from government.
Watched Mogg The Week, Jacob Rees Moggs youtube channel, as I quite like the intro music and he has got a certain wit that appeals to my sense of humour. This is the first time I have noticed that at the end when it asks you to subscribe ETC it mentioned something like like and share if you want J R Mogg in number ten. The first time I’ve noticed it but I only look ocassionally.
Methinks the vulchures are once again circling.
Maybe the vultures are circling but JRM isn’t the solution to our problems. He’s been rubbish.
Cheers Julian. I agree, it was an observation not a promotion.
And thanks for spelling vultures right.
One of the side-effects of the grim political non-choice is that idiots like Rees-Mogg begin to get an undeserved credibility.
The thing is that Johnson is the bloody PM. He can’t shirk responsibility and blame morally and intellectually bankrupt colleagues for his own total lack of backbone and rigour.
zzz…the Cabal always wins…..after the weekend results, at least AFC Wimbledon now only need one more point to avoid relegation from League One! And the protest march was great!
There were tears in my eyes when I read that article, tears of laughter. The idea of Bunter being a freedom loving libertarian is just laughable. Wanting to run off and join the lockdown sceptics revolt… pahaha!
The whole lot of them are no better than a stomach load of tape worms and the DM article is just smoke and noise.
Please! What have tape worms ever done to deserve that insult?
One problem that Boris faces now is that in order to end lockdowns, he kind of needs to accept that lockdowns and perhaps vaccines were a mistake. Admitting you were wrong is very difficult for politicians to do politically. Even if you want to be open minded about things, your political opponents will seize the chance to rubbish you.
“political opponents will seize the chance to rubbish you.”
I don’t think Mr Toad needs any help.
and I thought he was the prime minister.
Johnson and Cummings fighting like rats in a sack over an issue neither of them was even wrong about. If only either of them had spent 1/10 of the energy they devote to malevolence to actually understanding a tiny bit about actual viruses and epidemics. Let’s hope they destroy each other!
This whole spat reminds me of the time that the then chancellor Dennis Healey when questioned by his opposite number in the Commons described the experience as like being ‘savaged by a dead sheep’. Of course comparing Gove to a dead sheep is an insult to all sheep living or dead, whilst using the words ‘Prime Minister’ and ‘Boris Johnson’ in the same sentence seems like a contradiction in terms. Still anything that causes Johnson even a small fraction of the grief he has inflicted on the nation as a whole is to be earnestly wished for.
This alleged spat is nothing but a smokescreen and has zero credibility.
It’s not as if Bozo is even running the show – the globalists are in charge.
As Donald would say:
“Fake news.”