In my latest Spectator column, I say how pleased I was to see the pictures of Michael Gove enjoying himself on a night out in Aberdeen. It will make it that much harder for him to resume his advocacy of vaccine passports.
Scotland, after all, is experiencing a record number of coronavirus cases following the reopening of schools a few weeks ago, yet the minister was perfectly happy to visit several hospitality venues in Aberdeen without having to certify his Covid status. The implication of Gove’s night of revelry is that, like many of us, he’s decided to say good riddance to the restrictions that have been crippling the economy and wreaking havoc with people’s mental health and learned to live with the virus. The pictures of him posing for selfies, arm in arm with total strangers, his face and shirt pouring with sweat, were particularly refreshing.
Admittedly, the influential cabinet minister may not have intended to send a message that it’s time to get back to normal. This was a night out in Aberdeen, after all, not a Downing Street press conference. But the fact that he let his hair down in this way will make it harder for him to resume his position as the government’s finger-wagger-in-chief when it comes to restrictions on our freedoms.
It’s widely predicted that cases in England will start to surge as a result of our schools reopening – and will accelerate even more when university students go back — and no doubt the usual chorus of scientific advisers, public health panjandrums and NHS bosses will be clamouring for another lockdown. Before this, they could have counted on Gove as their closest cabinet ally. Now they may have to look elsewhere. For the minister to call for vaccine passports and other containment measures in England when he didn’t modify his behaviour in response to a case surge in Scotland will leave him vulnerable to the charge he cares more about protecting lives in England than in Scotland.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
They will still come into force. This is the plan afterall.
Only massive rejection will put a stop to it. But we are too meek to do that.
The only message Gove was sending was that the elite do not need to follow any of the rules; rules are only for the plebs.
Of course ‘cases’ will surge – think of all the extra testing that will be going on.
I will say it again STOP BLOODY TESTING.
Scamdemic over
Why are we calling them cases still? The PCR tests are not supposed to be for Covid as Kary Mullis pointed out that they pick up pretty much everything! No one heard of colds anymore or just flu, sore throats things like that. I think people have truly lost it.
Reading this one reminded me that, historically, many senior politicians have ended up being caught by assuming there isn’t a live microphone around, or a camera nearby etc. Serves him right.
The question has to be what is coming next?
Gove didn’t get caught out acting like a wally in a nightclub by accident; he’s too clever for that.
How did he manage to go to a nightclub and not come out with at least a tasty shiner for all his hard work supporting the narrative?
Scottish manhood is clearly not what it was.
I don’t think, for one moment, that this was an unguarded slip! More manipulation of the masses- “Oh look over here! Something shiny!” Meanwhile, in the background something nefarious is occurring.
What a revolting creature. Updated information, resources and useful links: FIGHT. BACK. BETTER. https://www.LCAHub.org/
Oh come ON, Tobes; you’re straw-clutching at best. You cannot infer what tw4ts like Gove are going to attempt to impose on the rest of us on the basis of some pissed-up night’s goings-on.
Ah, Gove… Always knew he was a posh pisshead, a Scot educated at Oxford along with all the other idiots running the asylum.
And another celebrity arse opens up on the topic of vaccines:
Covid: Prince Harry blames ‘mass-scale misinformation’ for vaccine hesitancy
I’ve always been a kind of default monarchist (the inevitability of President Blair in the absence of the monarchy sealed it for me), but if there were ever a prospect of that utter tosser sitting on the throne I think I could become a republican fanatic.
I don’t really get the often-used argument of ‘President Blair’ as a justification for the monarchy. After Iraq he became (and remains) massively unpopuar – there’s no way he would ever get elected.
But that aside, I notice that we have the weasel-word ‘hesitancy’ in that article. Most of those who haven’t had it by now are not ‘hesitant’, they are more ‘fuck off we don’t want it’!
In most parliamentary republics, presidents get appointed by the various chambers of parliament. It’s only in republics (e.g. USA) or semi-presidential republics (e.g. France) that presidents are elected by popular vote. Blair would have/would still attract broad cross-party support as most MPs are Blairites.
Similar to Macron, this guy is a non-entity completely contolled by the woman operating his (in his own opinion) most precious body part.
NB: I’m a monarchist, although no fan of the current British variant of that which is basically a monarchy in nothing but the expenses. But this doesn’t equal assuming that someone must make a good king (or queen) just because he happens to be a member of some royal family. The Prussians (& Germans) certainly had their share of monarchs of rather questionable ability.
Harry is an illiterate scrote, there is no media opposition to vaccines but the government itself has essentially said vaccines don’t make any difference, their policies demonstrate this.
That is the main reason for people not being vaccinated.
Toby – I don’t think you’ve counted on Gove being a rank hypcrite. As a supposedly ardent Brexiteer, he should’ve been a critical thinker and who loves freedom.
Yet he, in my view, has been the most vociferous advocate of hard lockdown measures throughout the pandemic, having lied time and again that the government had no plans to introduce (or even look at) COVID vaccine passports, the undertook a (IMHO) fake ‘opinion study’ via the Cabinet Office to see whether he could get away with a U-turn, then it got out they’d already spend £00ks on research already.
Whilst we are on the topic of Scotland, I see that the Scots must have refined the perfomance of their PCR testing as they are achieving a positivity rate of 11.5%.
I find this figure completely incredible, and it would go along way to account for the massive jump in “cases” there, along with the fact that testing numbers are going through the roof.
Seems like a daft article to me. He can say he was double-jabbed and therefore could have proved his status had he been asked to.
Yes and vaccine passports weren’t necessary so he wasn’t breaking the law.
Indeed. TY is grasping at straws here. He is clearly bothered by the apparent intention to introduce vaccine passports and is desperate to believe it’s not going to happen.
On the contrary, he wasn’t breaking any law, he didn’t need a vaccine passport to get in and probably won’t ever go to a nightclub in Aberdeen or anywhere else, ever again.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this news about Gove came out.
Most here inclined to agree with Julia Hartley-Brewer’s response to Toby’s suggestion, it appears:
Julia Hartley-Brewer
@JuliaHB1
·1h
No it won’t. This is not a Minister or a Government that has show itself to be remotely troubled by evidence of their blatant hypocrisy.
https://twitter.com/JuliaHB1/status/1433352034229571586
Correct. Kim Jong Johnson considered Matt Hancockwomble’s adultery to be a closed matter.
Well he would do wouldn’t he!
Of course, he openly tells people laws don’t apply to him and his cronies.
Meanwhile, to bring in some political balance, another icon of the left reveals himself to be utterly incompetent to address the world:
https://twitter.com/slydoug/status/1433297526191497221
Noam Chomsky:
“People who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to, but rather to insist that they be isolated. If people decide “I am willing to be a danger to the community”, by refusing a vaccine, they should then say “I also have the decency to isolate myself. Okay, I don’t want a vaccine, but I don’t have the right to run around harming people”. That should be a convention. Enforcing is a different question.”
One can debate to what extent this is the inherent collectivism of the political left, to what extent just the conformism of the intellectual, adhering desperately to the hysterical group-think overstatement of the covid “threat”, and whatever other motivations there might be for this undoubtedly intelligent person to believe such patent hogwash.
But it’s worth pointing out the nasty euphemism contained in “not forcing them”, but “insisting they be isolated”. This is the gateway to applying the modern leftist abuse of cancel culture – demonising and shunning – in order to coerce… Read more »
To Gnome Chomsky, I say ‘the human body does not belong to the state, you totalitarian turd. Your pronouncement comes straight from Stalin and you can go and live in a hippo’s arse, right before it has laxatives administered.’
AAAAH that’snot very nice. why are you being so cruel to hippo?
Enforced isolation is considered to be a form of torture. Hence, Chomsky’s stance is People who don’t agree to get vaccinated against Sars-CoV2 ought to be tortured until they do.
There’s no use trying to put lipstick on this hog.
“insisting they be isolated”.
In camps, perhaps? With showers?
I always thought Chomsky was a fool.
Noam Chomsky has been wrong about everything forever, he’s the goto guy for grauniad nonsense.
Another who needs to go up against the wall.
Refreshing, like sticking your head in a bucket of sick.
The only thing “refreshed” was Gove himself!
You do make a good point. Personally I found the video embarrassing.
I don’t get it when people wear a suit outside work. Just seems odd – even with the tie off.
Gove is odd. Aside from every other odious trait, he is a fuddy duddy with a stick up his arse.
One of his few redeeming features.
Sadly it has turned out that his oddness was probably a warning sign of whatever underlying mental disorder, perhaps shared with Cummings, predisposed him to his hysterical fear response to a new cold virus.
Indeed.
Interesting you should say that….
That’s what you wear when you haven’t got a life outside…of work.
Why didn’t he wear his disco pants!
What needs to happen now is some form of staged (because it’s all staged anyway so why quit now when we’re having so much fun) story about Gove being C19 positive and that now he is thought to be a super-spreader – call him Gove The Aberdeen Super Spreader. Then we need to see some kind of Australian witch hunt, like the guy who had the common cold/flu recently in Aus, who was hounded and hunted down by The Satanic Freemasons……sorry that should say The Police, my bad. That’s where we need to be going with all this – helicopters and search lights, blankets headlines across local and national media, all guns blazing, lynch mobs, the lot – because Govey boy caught the common cold. Why let a good crisis go to waste, as they say…..
It won’t make it difficult for him. He is a hypocrite, well steeped in doublethink.
At this stage it is evident that the vast majority of us either have had or will have Covid, or at least and dodgy positive test result stating the same.
Just as most of us have had Flu and survived so it will be with Covid. It is time to move on.
I suggest we now adopt a new policy which I am calling, Fuck Covid!
Anybody think it could catch on?
Cases are not surging due to children back at school, that is utter twaddle. Cases are surging because of PCR tests that are designed to give the results that governments want. Oh and of course there are the vaccine injuries, that are wrongly and often knowingly described as Covid breakthrough cases. Now roll up your sleeves, the boosters are on the way.
I did wonder when I saw this, whether it was some club that was enrolled in one of the vax pass schemes. Seems from what I can see with a quick search, it’s a club night hosted at O’Neills, cash on the door type deal. Anyone who know’s it who can confirm?
If that is the case, then at least the headline here might have some mileage..
I’m surprised Scotland hasn’t had a circuit breaker given the rise in ‘cases’ to all time highs. Something has changed. Either we aren’t going to see more lockdowns and will rely on more and more jabs and boosters OR they are keeping their powder dry for a big 6 month lockdown starting around October
Relying on jabs and boosters, sure that’ll work a treat.
Looks like 77th Brigade have been marking down!
Like in Israel, you mean? 🙂
And many people were predicting another lockdown in August. Don`t think there will be much compliance if another lock down happens
The autumn and early winter were always more likely than August. Most people are utterly gutless and/or stupid, so they will, in my view, comply with any new lockdown orders. Their compliance should be regarded as collaboration with people who are clearly enemy agents.
Because they want a casedemic as an excuse to bring in the Social Credit Score apps, which will “allow” some places to stay open, on sufferance.
That’s always been the goal, it’s just taken this long to get the systems in place.
Agreed. If anyone is interested a chap on the latest James Delingpole podcast (Delingpod not London Calling) does an excellent job of elucidating how it will play out, culminating in the implementation of new government owned digital currencies with the digital ID/apps being the conduit.
AND EVERY payment subject to checks and bureaucracy (and more tax) for your benefit of course…
Young’s desperate loyalty to his old friends generally does him credit (though where they are in positions of power or influence it does open him up to accusations of smarm), but he seems to have a remarkable ability to compartmentalise in this regard.
He knows (few better) the sheer scale of the murderous, evil harms the likes of Gove have inflicted on the world and on the nation, and just how gratuitous they were and are. He must now be aware that Gove was one of the obsessively fear-filled, neurotic prime movers in the government pushing for panic.
It is no exaggeration to say that the covid panic has been by some distance the greatest, most costly crime or blunder in UK peacetime governmental history, and it is yet a long way from finished. His “friend” Gove shares full personal responsibility for these events. There are, or should be, limits to how much gratuitous harm either friendship or political sympathy can sustain before they break.
The Guilty Men of the Covid Cabinet crossed those lines, for any decent person, long ago. Even Gove’s own wife seems understandably to have found his contemptible nature as revealed by his covid actions… Read more »
It baffles me. In general, friends and acquaintances with whom I shared some kind of mutual respect, intellectually and morally, who have gone with the panic are those I find the hardest to forgive, and indeed I have cut ties with more or less all of them.
it baffles me. I speak to loads of people and always say exactly what I think. Everyone agrees (that its not that bad, been overegged etc). But then they go off and behave as if its airborne Ebola. I think people have let the rational parts of their brains be overwhelmed by propaganda.
There’s also the doublethink element – many people will agree that muzzles and vaxxes don’t stop it spreading, but still insist that we must wear muzzles and get vaxxed to stop it spreading…
or as I was told yesterday “Masks won’t stop you catching it but it’s the ultimate show of respect for other people to wear a mask to show you care about their health.”
Those special 1-way cotton filters in action again.
You could look upon it as the opposite of respect – by indulging what you perceive as their irrational fear, you are assuming that others are weak-minded fools.
Up until now, the general medical opinion was that other people shouldn’t try to go along with the rituals of OCD sufferers as that only serves to reinforce it and make it worse…
When it comes to muzzles, I think more people than you’d dare imagine just ‘like’ wearing them. Small shops in Soho were selling muzzles for recreational purposes long before Pfeffel Johnson recommended them to families.
The fashion for pre-torn jeans is maybe less explicable.
Excellent comment more than just an uptick I feel. Know loads who have had ‘covid’ bad flu + they all said all recovered. 5 in theirs 90’s and underlying health conditions.
Great post Mark, thanks. A thousand upticks.
It seems to me that there are members of an elite (which includes TY) and there are the rest of us, and that if you belong in the elite group your loyalty to fellow members is absolute.
old school tie and all that
I suppose this all goes back to the heady days of Gove and his “Free Schools”, which were bitterly resisted in this part of the country, not least because of the enormous sums of money spent on them, and the profits made by all the usual hangers-on that make money out of being Government/Ministers’ favourites.
I have no idea whether these two are connected through interests other than education and free schools, but if indeed, “education” is the tie that binds, then it ill-behoves someone to cut slack for the man who is at back and more than in part responsible for wrecking the education of millions. Add to that the monstrous attacks on free speech and freedom of expression, and the suppression of dissent, carried out not by the woke brigade but by the Government and its purchased agencies, the main stream media at al, and there is yet another dichotomy and reason for any sensible person of principle to wash his hands of Gove. I’m pretty sure that Gove would p*ss on anybody’s back, close friend or foe, if it suited him cf. Brexit.
If any parties wrecked education it was those who nationalised it, subsidised it (always ruins quality) and centralised it.
i.e. the Department/Ministry of education. LEA’s and teachers unions.
I was thinking more specifically of wrecking it by removing it (such as it is), in large part, over the past 18 months, by use of “lockdown” measures and all the rest. There is a lot to be argued about State education, which has indeed been seriously damaged over decades, but I guess the question that then arises is whether depriving children of large expanses of learning by government diktat, cravenly riding on the back of union demands, is in any way acceptable. As with everything else at the moment, it’s a welter of half-baked ideas, knee-jerk reactions, chaos, lack of leadership and the usual race to the bottom.
He pisses on people’s fronts
I do wonder how the blunder theory can still hold any merit when evidence is in abundance that this whole thing has been organised and deliberate. They didn’t accidentally ship thousands upon thousands of people from hospitals into care homes and inject them with the life-ending drug Midazolam, for example.
Fuck the poison dwarf twat he should be hanging from a lamp post.
You could hang the stunted runt from a fence post, and not a tall one either.
Yes please.
“ It will make it that much harder for him to resume his advocacy of vaccine passports.”
You must be joking!!!
When was the fear of contradiction and hypocrisy ever a barrier for dangerous cupid stunts like Gove? He’s a superannuated scribbler, ffs!
He was probably taking part in a pilot study of ageing, bespectacled, jabbed MPs in Scottish nightclubs.
Appears to have a reverse-polarity magnetic effect.