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So what is Johnson trying to cover up? – politicalbetting.com
So what is Johnson trying to cover up? – politicalbetting.com
Given the lengths that appear to be being taken not to release certain information about the Johnson’s government handling of COVID the assumption must be that there is something very big that ministers are trying to cover up.
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And whilst it will be used as a way to get at those who had to make decisions (rightly or wrongly), it will end up doing f-all to what we need it to do: to ensure we can improve our decision-making process if faced with such a situation in the future.
A digital paper trail might be extraordinarily embarrassing.
The dodgy Trumpworld connections are extensive.
Live now: Tara Reade, who falsely accused Joe Biden of sexual assault in 2020, then spoke at the pro-Russia, no-aid-to-Ukraine "Rage Against the War Machine" DC rally in Feb 2023, is announcing her defection to Russia on Russian state TV. Her crowd is tied to Jan 6 too. 1/..
https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/1663624442940125184
All sheer coincidence, no doubt.
Though certainly if the government gets to decide what it can and can't look at - after having set its terms if reference and the enquiry started - it's not going to help the process.
It isn't saving Johnson or Hancock, it must be about something that compromises him.
My view fwiw, is if there is a criticism it is it will take far too long to report.
My guess is that there will be a lot of sarcasm, black humour, raw politics, profound ignorance and idiotic questions in this material. I can fully see why there is some apprehension about this going to an independent inquiry and depending on them to redact the embarrassing but irrelevant stuff.
One consequence of this is that government communications will lose some of the efficiencies that come with more modern technologies as they revert to less recoverable methods of speaking to each other.
It’s already become far too political, as we see from the Mirror’s headline.
The staff of the inquiry should speak to everyone involved confidentially, with no lawyers present, and the final report should contain findings and recommendations, with individual actors not named. This is how the AAIB works, and the result is that fewer planes crash. Far fewer planes. Which is what we all want from this, isn’t it?
That’s the rumour I’ve heard anyway.
"Given that Sunak was Chancellor for all this period it must be assumed that he has an interest in this not being made available."
Understatement!
Hopefully Sunak won't emerge in the same way as Gordon Brown, who is as big a war criminal as Tony Blair but rarely called such.
Who was at Chequers during Covid restrictions? I don't care whether they went or didn't go within 2 metres of anyone else. Just want the list.
“Bad people could use AI badly. We are all good people, so trust us to use it goodly”. I paraphrase slightly.
After all its hardly a state secret that Boris is crass, so seems stupid to try and keep it out of the public domain.
Information security of government communications is definitely fair game for the inquiry though. Why the hell are they all on WhatsApp - owned by Facebook - in the first place?
The first lesson to learn is that electronic communications of any type, live on forever unless explicitly designed to be deleted.
Now I understand my scenario is pure fiction but you can understand why I am suggesting viewing the electronic "paper" trail is pertinent to any review of facts. Perhaps logging events on WhatsApp isn't ideal as a tool of government.
It appears that evidence will conclude in 2026 so it looks as if it could he 2027 or later before the final report
Kicking into touch comes to mind
A free society requires free debate.
@Docstockk
's invitation to the
@OxfordUnion
should stand and students should be allowed to hear and debate her views.
We mustn’t allow a small but vocal few to shut down discussion.
https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1663543575991435265
Whoever thought it a good idea to make someone as inappropriate as Boris Johnson our PM FFS?!
Which then opens up the question what are in those messages / letters / minutes that need to be hidden? Is it things about Brexit as TSE alludes to below, outright corruption in getting PPE supplies or something else..
It can't just be Bozo having friends round in Chequers?
It is rather striking that the only Tory leader elected by the wider party membership that hasn’t proved both manifestly the wrong choice and a total disaster was Cameron in 2005. And he was at best a mixed success.
William Hague has a lot to answer for.
It certainly gives an impression of a cover up which in turn results in all kinds of speculation
Just provide the information and trust the judge to decide
There were clearly some appallingly bad PPE contracts, with 1,000% profit margins commonplace, and tens and hundreds of millions involved.
Ministers vehemently denied any malfeasance. A WhatsApp trail might render some of those denials implausible.
If all if this stuff is redacted, we'll never know one way or the other.
On the one hand, if it's politically embarrassing chatter about Brexit, she's quite unlikely to publish it.
On the other, PPE corruption would clearly not be covered up.
There's probably quite a large grey area in between, but I'd expect a judge to tend, if in doubt, not to publish.
However the Inquiry is absolutely necessary. We can't not have one. We owe it to all the people who suffered during the pandemic. That's the real point of it imo. To give the whole episode its due weight and as a mark of respect to the victims.
I don't see why MPs should get involved. They need to deal with the beam in their own eye before tackling that mote.
But personally I would guess that Sunak’s unease is because there were some very strong reservations expressed about the cost, benefit and possible impact of Eat Out to Help Out.
I can support the principle of civil servants needing to be able to freely communicate - but as the email system is completely secure, they can. For the stuff they do not want to put in writing, don't put it in writing!
So much went wrong during Covid, with various proven and suspected issues and in some cases offences. So we cannot have WhatsApp as some kind of secrecy barrier to prevent a statutory enquiry from carrying out its task.
I'm not bothered about colourful language or thinking the unthinkable. I am bothered by things like shit decisions which killed the elderly en mass, and the open corruption in the Tory party where billions of our money was handed to their mates for nothing.
This is bad for the Government on "a no smoke, no fire, what are they trying to hide" basis. It might be that Johnson is merely concerned about innocuous, but what Mrs Johnson might deem saucy, content between him and Mad Nad rather than the fear of uncovering any wide scale criminality.
He's an avid cyclist too.
It's probably part of his USP. Brand Boris.
I suspect the beginning of the end for Pip was the queue jumping.
I am not sure, however, this is a matter for politicians seeing they are hauling in ITV to interrogate them over it.
Photos of what South Korea says are likely part of the failed North Korean space launch vehicle fired today
https://twitter.com/joshjonsmith/status/1663723843608002560
Mr. B2, the M-AI-L newspaper, however, is running with the headline: Humanity could wipe out AI.
Like the following:
https://labour.org.uk/press/dozens-of-companies-offering-ppe-ignored-by-government-labour-reveals/
We should not lose sight of exactly how desperate things were at the time.
I don't think so. WhatsApp is an audit trail. It is written. Documented. When the shit hits the fan everything that is written - or not written - is there for inspection. If you want to have off-the-record chats, don't do it in writing.
We already know there is fire. 9 figure contracts. Awarded without tender. To a company days old. Who have no knowledge of PPE. Who then order it from Ali Express. Which is unusable when delivered. But the money is paid anyway. And then the director tries to strike off the business without ever filing any accounts.
If we can't investigate that - and its not a singular example - then what is the point in anything? We may as well just have a Tory tax where we pay a tythe to the people who own the Tory party.
Johnson is such a toxic toad.
I honestly don't care about This Morning or Schofield. What he allegedly has done sounds a little *interestng* morally, but we all live in the same greenhouse armed with stones. What IS interesting is the reaction from the right, who are going after him like he is Rolf Harris. He isn't, but the Heil readership have been induced to be so judgemental that they're lapping it up.
*anyone who isn't a GBeebies presenter is a TV leftie
Recent experience suggests this is a bold assumption.
I would expect most politicians across the political divide use what's app
'Well I AM a Conservative..'
I think we're all beginning to get a clearer idea what BEING a Conservative is and it goes beyond independent thought and into the realm of religion as you've just delicately pointed out.
Corbyn, twice, I will give you.
And the SNP, Plaid and even the Liberal Democrats have made some funny choices in the past.
But the Tory wider membership consistently makes not just the wrong choice but clearly a disastrous choice. It was obvious Johnson, Truss and Smith were inferior to Hunt, Sunak and Clarke for the role they were choosing and simply not up to it - but they still chose them.
Striking that the Tories were always considered arch-pragmatists. Clearly that may be true of the MPs but it isn't true of the majority of the ordinary members.
The government was pretty much in panic from March 2020 to March 2021. As were all of us. We needed PPE. Which would have been okay, except virtually every other country in the world needed PPE.
Do you say that a dead person is dying? No, a dead person is already dead, only living people are dying.
Turkey hadn't joined the EU. It was joining the EU. That is a matter of fact, joining is a process and it was in that process and was having rounds of accession talks and agreements with one taking place the week before the referendum.
If regulators can make such rules for many thousands of people/firms, I see no reason why the same shouldn't apply to ministers.
They are not.
It looks awful that Tory mates were awarded £107m contracts without tender. But if they actually delivered the PPE then they did at least do the job. And they made a fat profit? Meh - had the same fat profit been made by the proper PPE companies ignored by government we would have spent similar amounts.
No, the scandal is where mates were awarded these 9-figure contracts, delivered nothing, and took the money anyway. So that's our money, stolen, and nothing in return. Some of these spiv outfits are now hastily being wound up to avoid publishing accounts.
The right get *incensed* when a single mother gets too many social security payments. Yet when its billions they are only angry at those of us asking the questions.
Why is that...?
It's quite simple: what he did should have got him sacked much earlier than it did. It also highlights (sadly, yet again) a problem in the media, with the 'talent' abusing their position and power. And my goodness, the optics of it are terrible for him.
I am not that bothered about the lining of pockets where actually usable PPE was delivered. I am bothered when it was not - and we paid anyway. They have stolen - and it is stolen as they did not fulfil the contract - YOUR money. And you are fine with it. Why is that?
The nearest parallel is a war. We were in a war, and we had to make decisions fast, with massive competition worldwide for a limited resource. There was waste, and there were charlatans. But the primary need was to get the kit. And we did - in fact, we ended up with too much. True fraudsters should be prosecuted.
It'd be interesting to know the percentages of all of this: how much was spent; how much was delivered, how much was usable etc. I think I've seen it somewhere before, but cannot immediately find it.
As I've said all through this hideous mess - I'm glad I'm not the one who had to make the decisions.
In which case, the Mail are doing one of the things good journalism does- finding about about something important in the lives of their readers. But also something bad journalism does- doing down a commercial rival (for advertising, if nothing else).
See also: newspaper crusades against WFH.
Your war analogy is interesting though. It was a war, and we had established generals (PPE companies) with a track record of fighting wars.
We ignored them. And rang our mate who had heard of war but never done it. And put him in charge of fighting our war.
I'm not voting Labour so the whataboutery doesn't work on me. The government ignored the actual PPE companies and bet our lives on Lady Mone and Matt Hancocks pub landlord...
If joining the EU only referred to the date of accession, then it would happen overnight, but the EU explicitly say that is not the case.
Indeed if you go to the "joining EU" webpage of the EU's own website, Turkiye as its now called is still listed on that webpage.
https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/joining-eu_en
A female presenter on Coast met her partner when she taught him at school, as a minor. Barely a murmur about that at the time. Favourable articles in the Mail. So there are some double standards at play.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2146126/Tessa-Dunlop-Presenter-TVs-Coast-tells-extraordinary-story-met-husband.html
There is also the issue with his brother and Pip reportedly telling his brother not to do it again when his brother admitted his noncing activities to him instead of engaging Plod.
All rather sordid. I do think Queuegate is the thing that led to his downfall.
In which case, I might ask how CQM Learning was an 'established general' in the PPE market. Or Issa Exchange Ltd (and those are just two from Labour's press release).
The latter looks particularly interesting if you look at their 202 accounts...
If he didn't want the decision making that came with it, he shouldn't have done that.