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Has Sunak got his own lockdown secret that he’s trying to hide? – politicalbetting.com
Has Sunak got his own lockdown secret that he’s trying to hide? – politicalbetting.com
Paul Waugh in the Indy has a good piece pondering why Sunak is going to such lengths to avoid scrutiny over what he was doing during lock-down. The mere fact that this is all going to court could suggests that there is something that he doesn’t want to be made public.
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If something big comes out, he's in serious -- probably terminal -- trouble.
If it's terminal, the pressure for a (not that early) General Election will become intense.
I see that it's 10/1 that the next General Election will be in 2023. I might have expected longer odds, but given the above I wonder if, nonetheless, there's some value there, if only as a trading bet?
Disclosure: I've never placed a bet in my life (I married a Methodist). Which may make my long years of lurking here seem all the odder, but I lurk (and occasionally post some ill-considered tripe here) nonetheless!
It was that they imposed those rules and then didn't keep them themselves. They deprived people of the right to go to birthday parties or visit dying relatives, whilst all the while mocking us.
The British public will never forgive them for this and on election day vengeance will be brutal.
The most consistent feature of all the polls is the tories in the mid to high 20's % and the Lab-LibDems in the mid 50's%.
Election night is going to be a bloodbath.
Still, Sunak’s reticence has been exposed as self-interested. He wants to keep to a minimum the embarrassments of the Covid era, because they remind many millions of voters exactly when and why they came to despise this government. And, more self-interestedly still, the PM fears that Hallett is about to set a precedent for full disclosure – which means the investigators could soon demand to see every message on his phone.
I posted the latest opinion poll showing a 21% Labour lead. It's fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
The mean for the last 10 national polls is:
Conservatives 28.3 %
Labour-LibDems 54.6%
I put Labour-LibDems together because there's evidentially (04-05-23) a double pincer movement in operation amongst the electorate against the Conservatives.
As Mike recently posted: The Labour Lead is Very Steady Across a Range of Pollsters (https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/05/31/the-lab-lead-is-very-steady-across-the-range-of-pollsters/)
I know you may not 'like' these findings but going Ad Hominem is weak, and dismissing them out of hand as 'tripe' reflects poorly on your political judgement.
There are plenty of good, non-offal, reasons for proposing that Dec 19 was a one-off. It came on the back of a stalemate parliament and Boris galvanised the 'Get Brexit Done' vote which was the raison d'etre of the election. He was up against an unelectable Trotskyite anti-semite. It had one purpose: to deliver a majority so that Brexit could be enabled.
Since then, a series of catastrophic occurrences (many self-induced) have Ratnered the Conservative brand. And bubbling away in the background is the clusterfuck of Brexit - the very thing which motivated the Dec 19 vote.
No, the truer benchmark is the last proper General Election which was 08 June 2017 - which resulted in a hung parliament.
I know this part, unlike the previous, is more polemical and less factual but I think there's a good case for it. And I warn punters on here to pay attention, lest you lose your money.
F1: no tip, but a little pre-qualifying musing: https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2023/06/spain-pre-qualifying-2023.html
I think it'll be interesting to see how axing the chicane affects racing. While I expect Verstappen to win handily, that difference could make for more passing.
It's a shame the FA Cup Final isn't a little later in the afternoon as it cuts into the day, but one not to miss I feel.
xx
I’d add that given current inflation rates tying up money in bets that won’t see returns for some time aren’t appealing either.
All that being said, the cardinal rule of gambling is to never bet what you can’t afford to lose, and at the moment I don’t have spare cash for gambling.
It isn't just the Pandemic and how it was handled. It isn't just the Government's public and private dishonesty. It's that over thirteen years voters have accumulated enough reasons to punish them, and this time round there is no chimera, like Brexit, or bogeyman, like Corbyn, to scare them out of doing it.
The reasons for voting out the Government will vary from individual to individual. Some will be more common than others. I expect anger at the privations of lockdown whilst members of the Government were playing fast and loose with the regulations will run deep in many cases, but it is far from the only offence for which retribution will be taken.
I agree with you therefore, Heathener, and disagree respectfully with OGH. I am anticipating a bloodbath, and would gently advise friends who are betting against it to moderate their stakes.
There is no question that in Mar 2020 it was lockdown or public health collapse.
The evidence from every single poll for the last year is that the public has a settled intention to remove the Conservatives from office. The "week is a long time" is less relevant in that context. The Tories need a very large black swan. Attacking Heathener for pointing that out is an unpleasant evasion of that obvious fact.
The determination to avoid locking down - for example, from my own experience, ordering schools to stay open when they couldn't actually staff their lessons, refusing to consider phased lessons and even simple things like ordering staff who should according to law have been isolating to go into work - meant, ironically, that another full lockdown became necessary.
If it's true that they are unlikely to be successful in their legal bid to decide for themselves, what is relevant to the Inquiry, is there some benefit to them in stalling for time?
It does seem as though Boris may know the answer, or is he just playing a game of his own?
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols says that when she was elected in 2019, the Labour whips gave her a list of thirty male MPs that she should avoid being alone with, at risk of her personal safety.
In 2019, Labour saw 202 MPs elected.
Remove the female MPs, and you are left with 98.
Remove the men who have declared themselves as gay, and you are left with 83.
Remove those who were newly elected in 2019 and therefore unlikely to be on the whips' black list, and you are left with just 77 (by my reckoning).
Which suggests that a woman who finds herself alone with a heterosexual Labour MP stands an almost 40% chance of being in the company of a potentially dangerous sexual predator.....
(edit/ I am making the assumption here that the MPs on the Labour whips' blacklist were all their own, which does seem to be the inference of the story, but I haven't seen explicitly stated)
Edit - also, those six elected in 2019 still be included in your final figure as you said 'being left alone' without qualifying it.
And per your edit, assuming the chances are the same with the new lot as the old lot!
Since the Conservative party was remade in BoJo's wobbly image, it's been good at persuading people that it wants personal freedom, national vigour, levelling up yada yada. But loudly wanting something isn't enough.
Unfortunately, the things it has done and the way it has gone about them have left us less free, less vigorous and more dependent on City middlemen than before.
The long lockdown at the start of 2021 was the price we paid for the unsuccessful attempt to save Christmas 2020.
Sunak and the government prevarication over this matter will lead to the question what is being hidden
Personally I think it is an own goal, but Sunak is not good at politics and is more a technocrat than most PM’S
Johnson of course must think we are all easily led when he says he is submitting his what's app etc direct to the inquiry but conveniently only from May 21 when he announced the enquiry, and his important what's app etc over the previous 15 months have just disappeared into space
The conservative party need to go into opposition and rediscover their one nation credentials and it is not unreasonable to expect a substantial loss for them at GE24
However, I do not subscribe to the narrative that Starmer is the new messiah that will deliver the nation from the deep and long standing fractures following covid, the war in Ukraine, and to a degree Brexit. Indeed my preferred result for GE 24 would be a minority led Labour government or a Labour government with a small majority
Anyway back to discussing the Scholfield media drama no doubt but not for me
I'm sure we will all remember it when it comes time to vote.
We knew from what happened in other countries that the infection fatality rate would be on the order of 1% - with a functioning NHS. The point that people are too stupid to grasp is that if we had followed through the crazy idea of letting the whole population get infected over the course of a couple of months, there wouldn't have been a functioning NHS for people with COVID or any other condition.
WTF? Point me to a person, one person, who has come close, within a mile, to describing Starmer as a “new messiah”. As I pointed out to BJO the other day the level of ire Starmer creates in his opponents is wholly disproportionate to the enthusiasm he generates in his supporters. Nobody, literally nobody, thinks that he’s going to do all that. I say that as a Labour voter.
As for your implication that the war in Ukraine has fractured the country more than Brexit, can I have some of what you’re smoking? Are you that more a handful of Trots and nutters are supporting Russia?
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/14/media/bob-enyart-death-covid/index.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/covid-texas-gop-scott-apley-b1897325.html
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/medical-advances/584077-more-and-more-conservative-media-leaders-are/
For example, it was obvious from October 2020 onwards that the level of disruption to education meant exams run as usual would be worthless, if they could be run at all. (Interestingly, this would not necessarily have been the case in 2020, but that's another story.) But right until January, not only were the government insisting they would go ahead, but refused point blank to make any contingency plans for them being cancelled. Indeed, anyone who called for plans to be made, or tried to make them, was threatened with reprisals for 'undermining the public narrative.'
So when they were finally cancelled, we were left with no plans for replacing them, even though we could and should have been readying ourselves for that scenario from September.
The result was that we actually had *more* exams than before, because we needed so many test papers, which was twice as expensive (no extra funding was provided for extra photocopying and staffing, but exam boards still charged pretty much full fees) and uneven in quality (because despite assurances almost no additional papers were provided and in most subjects only one actually useful set of papers existed after the botched exam reforms of the Gove era).
This was basic, it was simple and any vaguely intelligent human being would have been on it. One of the ways the teaching unions did get it right and that is not something they managed with everything in the pandemic is they were demanding this contingency planning from a year out. The bullying and abuse they received not from ministers but from civil servants - some of whom, we now find, were under the influence of 'works meetings' in these sessions - was appalling and in my view should have been career ending. But it hasn't been.
This is the kind of thing we need to have investigated. Although to be honest I'm not sure how useful this inquiry would be for that. It's not the government made mistakes. That's allowable. They were in a very difficult situation. And the inquiry can make recommendations for next time to improve their response. But clearly there were people who were either so stupid they should not be running a Costa drive through or so wilfully negligent they should be doing jail time. And those people are still out there doing damage.
The stench is far worse this time. The government is suffering from Necrotising fasciitis - it is consuming itself. It has stopped governing, stopped with actual policies. It gets the crayons out and comes up with slogans, or even announces proposed new laws which it then quietly drops. And its solution to everything isn't to act, it is to blame everyone else.
Instead of governing, they are expending their energy eating themselves. The Covid enquiry was created grudgingly, very late, deliberately to kick the can down the road. And now the government who created it is suing its own enquiry to stop WhatsApp messages being handed over to save the reputation of the former PM who just handed them over.
I know that we have some Tories on here, but even they must be able to smell death. How can they not? It isn't even about Labour or Keith Donkey not being Tony Blair - the Tory government is necrotic.
What does Sunak have to hide? I'm not sure that he knows the detail. But he can smell it.
Ministers would have been talking to experts, and those experts would have been giving WAG about things they did not really have data for. Could it have been Black Death orders of magnitude? Yes. It was unlikely, but it was possible.
Remember, the criticisms (including on here) at the time was that the government did not lock down had enough, or soon enough.
(*) We should really be furious with China over this. They lied and covered up, and it cost lives over here.
Not that I recall but I may have!
Ukraine has caused terrible damage to economies around the world and brexit has had problems but they can be ameliorated and will be
The thing is, absent a white swan event, I cannot see how the Conservatives are going to win back the public. Sunak might be a solid, workaday PM, but like Major, he has inherited a party that is at war with itself, and which has been in power too long.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1664806513762762752
Trump: How about Patton? He used to slap them around. You get out there and you fight. He would have been out within two days of the military. We've gotten so bad.
Patton was, of course, reassigned away from meaningful leadership as a result.
As even with lockdowns it's got to around half that, if anything it seems an underestimate. But they may have been thinking in terms of six or twelve months.
It's OK; I persuaded her to join a local (Anglican) church. She needed a bit of a circuit-breaker. Would she ever return to Methodism? Parish the thought!
Labour maj 50 but a stronger than expected LD performance will hit the Tories hard.
It's irritating for sure. Why haven't we got 48 sheet posters of Sunak in front of that 'Stop the Boats' sign posted by DA last night? It does everything you could ever wish for from a bit of knocking copy.
I feel like the nervous soldier in Zulu being told to wait till you see the whites of their eyes.....
Imagine being a decision maker in a large country in mid-March 2020. You know there is a virus spreading around the world. Bad scenes are coming out of other countries, and China - where it started - are being very, very secretive - as if they have something bad to hide.
You talk to experts. One expert says it will be akin to a cough, and the only fatality will be a 95-year old man called Frank from Dewsbury. Another expert says it *may* give fatality levels at the 50% levels. Other experts give ranges of predictions between those. All are giving their best guesses, and are being truthful with no political or social biases.
Other experts give you potential actions, from doing nothing, to immediate and harsh lockdown.
And this is another politician's dilemma: having to make immediate decisions of vast importance on very incomplete data.
And all of this, knowing that when better data comes in, people will say that with hindsight, you made the wrong decision.
Again I say: I'm glad I didn't have to make the decisions.
The reporting around this has been extremely poor in leading to that misconception. As previously noted here.
But it was closer to a speculative wish than hard prediction, I think.
Fair point about dodgy extrapolation being a bipartisan habit.
They didn't seem to understand that, but again, that merely demonstrates how unfit for purpose our government had become that such charlatans could rise to the top.
That said, the Labour Party have behaved abominably over the issue, so perhaps they exclusively deserve to have the entire bucket of ordure poured over them, rather than sharing it with the Conservatives.
I know I am probably the only person on pb who thinks this.
If you think the ‘Johnson birthday party’ at work, during work, is your idea of fun then I pity you.
The rules were too strict on certain things. Never again should people have to die separated from their relatives and spouses. If a situation requires lockdown or something similar, don’t get into micromanagement. Set the rules and stick to it.
I’d also castigate the media in this. Every single press conference seemed to be a chance for a gotcha moment. PB was far better informed and would have asked far better questions.
I think the government will suffer from stuff that comes out of the Inquiry, probably unfairly, in the most part. People are very poor at remembering what those days were like. How little we really knew. All they want is to lay the blame somewhere.
I often feel that some think no-one should have died of covid if the government had made the right calls. This is nonsense, and ignores the experiences of other western governments who ended up with broadly similar outcomes.
But a JR? Jeez. How have relations already got so poisonous with the Inquiry that things have come to this?
*Personally I am cautious even there but that's because I am boring. Some posts are deleted on receipt. Current developments are likely to accentuate this.
He wanted the title. He wanted the perks. He wanted the acclaim, the adulation, the deference.
But the work?
Fuck that...
If both of these trends continue then we are into bloodbath territory. Not a Labour landslide because ABC doesn't always mean voting Labour. Not a Labour landslide because the Tories will likely keep hold of some recently won territory especially in the midlands.
The simple truth though is that LibDem, Green, SNP MPs will not be the opposition. They will not blindly vote against a Labour government. You could get a Labour majority of 50 but a working majority of 100. Where by working with the rest of the ABC block they drive through some long term changes that screw the Tories in opposition even harder.
Those of us who were, ignoring the lies of that idiot Fabricant, actually working on the front line were not having any parties at all, never mind boozy ones.
If their own rules were stupid (which they were) then that only really makes things worse.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7724983/Labour-election-candidate-probed-police-shes-accused-giving-false-address.html
That's yooooooooge
Starmer hasn't sealed the deal with the electorate (yet). Unless he does there's always the chance that the electorate will shy away from giving him a majority.
". We will ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of the individuals against an overbearing state, while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless
delays"
Oh dear oh dear. When they said "individuals" apparently they meant "ministers" even though the primary target has already agreed to comply. And "conducting politics by another means" - Sunak vs Johnson, Johnson vs Sunak.
As I said in an earlier post, they are necrotic.
But that is ok and was predicted. No doubt the government had modelling which indicated the degree of compliance that could reasonably be expected and overshot the regulations to some degree to reflect that.
What this inquiry should be focusing on, rather than government tittle tattle, is how decisions were made, and how, in some cases the expert advice was so wrong (I am not suggesting for a moment that it was anything other than genuine). In other words, did the expert structure have built into it an excessive degree of caution, a tendency to ignore the non medical consequences of their decisions and a degree of group think that was unhealthy? How could we do it better the next time?
The government claimed arresting women at a vigil using Covid regulations was not relevant to an enquiry about Covid. So we know that their judgement is demonstrably wrong.
Things like Covid come around very, very rarely. The vast majority of leaders will never be faced with something of such import.
Your argument about charlatans can also fit Starmer. After all, he rejoined the cabinet and supported when Corbyn, an anti-Semite, was his leader. He was totally unscrupulous in how he got the job. A decent man would have stayed resigned.
Probably nothing but for those into tittle tattle Natalie Rowe on Twitter sometimes makes the odd comment in between bashing Piers Morgan and others.
I suspect the allegations she has made and which have been more or less corroborated by Duffield and Creasey are accurate. It is the reporting that has couched this as an exclusively Labour scandal after the Davies revelations. Evan Davis interviewing Creasey yesterday tried to allude to the 30 MPs being Labour and referenced the front bencher who BigG wants sacked and remains currently un-sacked.
One of the reasons for supporting the government giving advice (or possibly even creating laws) to reduce social contact, to reduce the infection rate, is that it creates trust in the government's intentions so that the public will trust the government when HMG later say it is safe for people to go about their business as normal. Arguably that's more important than the lockdown itself.
If HMG failed to create that trust then many people would self-lockdown (somewhat reducing the extent of infection and death) and those people wouldn't have a signal they could rely on that the danger had passed.
Major's reputation after being PM has largely improved. Blair's has decreased. Thatcher's reputation has probably remained neutral: she was too divisive, although I think some of the heat of the dislike has decreased recently. Although hatred of her still remains mythic in some quarters, even amongst those who could never vote for her.
(I recently heard a podcast where a thirty-something Aussie was spewing Thatcher-hate, and insinuating it was a shame the Brighton bombing failed.)
I can't really say if Brown's reputation has improved or declined; he seems to be mostly forgotten. Cameron shines like a star against his immediate predecessor and successors, but has the Brexit decision against his name (then again, I think a referendum was inevitable).
Frankly I struggle to recall almost anything that did or did not happen during Covid, apart from ordering food and groceries online
Under the uncertainty of the moment the lock downs were a perfectly reasonable response. Partying like it was 1999, whilst we were locked down wasn't.
" His spokesman said Johnson “wouldn’t have seen” the advice before the press conference at which he boasted about continuing to shake hands.
The spokesman insisted the prime minister had taken other precautions, including regular handwashing, and that he changed his behaviour when the official advice changed."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/05/boris-johnson-boasted-of-shaking-hands-on-day-sage-warned-not-to
Incidentally, about a week after that, my parents were driving back with their caravan when another driver took off their wing mirror. They stopped to exchange details, and the other driver came up and shook my dad's hand. My mum was horrified, but it was an instinctive gesture on both their parts.