So, two years ago tomorrow is the last time the Tories were ahead in any poll.
6 Dec 2021, Redfield & Wilton, Con 38%, Lab 36%, LD 11%, Green 6%, RefUK 4%, SNP 4%.
I wonder when the next one will be?
Not all that long ago I expected that at least one poll would have Labour 10 points or fewer ahead of the Tories by Christmas. It rather looks as if this will not be the case.
NYT - Inside the Secret Meeting That Cleared the Way for Tom Suozzi’s Return
Gov. Kathy Hochul had been toying with blocking the former congressman’s nomination for the crucial special election to replace George Santos. Then a phone call came.
With his successor, George Santos, expelled from Congress, Tom Suozzi appeared to be on the brink of a full-scale comeback campaign on Monday. Then he got a worrisome request: Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted to see him. In Albany. Tonight.
Mr. Suozzi knew Ms. Hochul, a bitter rival, had been toying for weeks with trying to block him from becoming the Democratic nominee in a special election to replace Mr. Santos. So he cleared his schedule, fighting through three hours of rush-hour traffic to arrive at the Governor’s Mansion after nightfall.
Inside, Ms. Hochul presented Mr. Suozzi with multiple demands, according to two people briefed on the previously unreported meeting. She wanted to see his battle plan; needed the Roman Catholic former congressman to agree to run as a full-throated defender of abortion rights; and sought assurances that he would not run ads damaging their party’s brand.
Mr. Suozzi, 61, acceded to each request. Then he offered something else to soften the ground: an apology for aggressive personal tactics he deployed against Ms. Hochul in a 2022 primary campaign for governor, particularly for casting doubt on her family’s ethics.
The meeting amounted to an unusual flex of power from a governor who has typically preferred making friends over harboring grudges. But the assurances made room for a crucial détente that has cleared the way for party leaders to formally announce Mr. Suozzi as their candidate as soon as Thursday. . . .
Ms. Hochul declared separately on Tuesday that the special election would take place on Feb. 13.
It will be no easy fight. The district, which stretches from the outskirts of Queens through the affluent northern suburbs of Nassau County, voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 but has moved sharply rightward since amid voters’ concerns over crime and rising costs. Elections analysts rate it a tossup.
Republicans were still vetting more than a dozen candidates for their own nomination on Tuesday. Two front-runners had emerged, officials said: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.
Democrats nominally entertained other candidates in their own process, most notably Anna Kaplan, a state senator who had positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. . . .
But Mr. Suozzi long ago emerged as the ideal candidate for most party leaders. He held the seat for six years before relinquishing it to challenge Ms. Hochul, enjoys high name recognition and has a track record of bucking his party on issues like public safety and high taxes — positions that could help him win back voters who have flocked to Republicans. . . .
She was alive," the witness says. "She was bleeding from her back."
She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim's body during the assault.
"They sliced her breast and threw it on the street," she says. "They were playing with it."
The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues.
"He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn't even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates."
AND, from the same report:
Another, Nachman Dyksztejna, provided written testimony of seeing the bodies of two women in kibbutz Be'eri with their hands and legs tied to a bed.
"One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed," his statement says.
-----------------
This is what Israelis are reading about. This is what they are learning was the fate of their young people. People they knew, and could well have been related to.
It's really impossible to see how there can be any meaningful ceasefire or cessation until the IDF has levelled Gaza. Israeli public opinion simply won't allow it.
What possesses people to commit such acts? I find it utterly beyond comprehension.
Are they drugged up? Are they orders of magnitude more evil than any person I have ever met (even the genuinely nasty people I've met)?
It's often said that anyone is capable of murder, and I believe that in the right (or rather wrong) circumstances, that is true. But this is a level of depravity that I cannot comprehend.
(On reflection, it's not totally unprecedented - similar examples exist from WW2 and before, and no doubt more recent conflicts too. Baffling to me though.)
You must read Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy. He describes in some detail the behavior of Japanese troops who had been left to die, and their indiscriminate raping and murdering of local civilians. It is genuinely shocking.
Human beings are capable of terrible evil.
Read Christina Lamb's "Our Bodies,Their Battlefields" - grim, very grim.
Or this from Janice Turner's article in the Times this weekend -
"In a new preface to her wide-ranging and grave book Our Bodies: Their Battlefield, Christina Lamb notes: “In the last eight years I have seen more sexual violence inflicted upon women by soldiers and militias than any other time in my 35-year career.”
She also reports that invading Russians filmed themselves raping Ukrainian women then posted it on porn sites. Maybe the two are connected. Was the choreographed depravity of Hamas in part men gleefully enacting a violent sexual template they’d absorbed online? Hamas footage is the ultimate revenge porn.
Rape, as Lamb notes drily, is not just an ancient weapon but a cheap one, which draws female non-combatants into an orbit of terror. Bullets are quotidian horrors compared to being gang-raped daily like the Nigerian girls stolen by Boko Haram or the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women”. One captured Hamas gunman said commanders ordered fighters to “sully” Israeli girls. God knows what female Israeli soldiers held hostage face deep below Gaza.
Yet for all the terror, damage and shame that war rape brings, it is seldom prosecuted. It is seen as trivial relative to other atrocities, more an unfortunate consequence of war than a human rights abuse."
The silence of so many human rights activists and feminist groups, the denial sends out a message to rapists that they will almost certainly get away with it.
And it's not just in war time. When I was doing my forensic science course as part of my barrister's training we had to see pictures of what being raped with a broken glass bottle does to a woman. That was in peacetime in this country.
No party that has been behind in every poll continuously for two years has ever won the subsequent GE.
Gosh. I was going to ask "what about '79 to '83?", but no, there was a poll in February 1981, and even if it was done by Outy McLierface from Outlier City, there was a Conservative lead.
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
No party that has been behind in every poll continuously for two years has ever won the subsequent GE.
Gosh. I was going to ask "what about '79 to '83?", but no, there was a poll in February 1981, and even if it was done by Outy McLierface from Outlier City, there was a Conservative lead.
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
So there's still a chance, I guess.
"a suicide note of a manifesto."
There is more chance of Elvis being found alive on the moon than Starmer/Reeves/McSweeney Labour writing a suicide manifesto.
It will be long on rhetoric, long on photos, very tight on some extreme specifics (e.g. VAT on private skools) and otherwise nothing to stop people who have already decided to vote these feckers out from pausing.
That looks like a crucial winner in the title race for Arsenal.
Absolutely. Last season they couldn't close out key wins at the end of the season. Will it be different this time?
I think Man City will still win the league.
Yeah. Me and my betting slip, too. Rice and Havertz look like a great deal spent, but spent well. This isn't the end of the season though. City come good then.
No party that has been behind in every poll continuously for two years has ever won the subsequent GE.
Gosh. I was going to ask "what about '79 to '83?", but no, there was a poll in February 1981, and even if it was done by Outy McLierface from Outlier City, there was a Conservative lead.
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
So there's still a chance, I guess.
That alt-history 1983/4 GE where the Falklands had never been invaded is a tough one to call.
She was alive," the witness says. "She was bleeding from her back."
She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim's body during the assault.
"They sliced her breast and threw it on the street," she says. "They were playing with it."
The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues.
"He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn't even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates."
AND, from the same report:
Another, Nachman Dyksztejna, provided written testimony of seeing the bodies of two women in kibbutz Be'eri with their hands and legs tied to a bed.
"One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed," his statement says.
-----------------
This is what Israelis are reading about. This is what they are learning was the fate of their young people. People they knew, and could well have been related to.
It's really impossible to see how there can be any meaningful ceasefire or cessation until the IDF has levelled Gaza. Israeli public opinion simply won't allow it.
What possesses people to commit such acts? I find it utterly beyond comprehension.
Are they drugged up? Are they orders of magnitude more evil than any person I have ever met (even the genuinely nasty people I've met)?
It's often said that anyone is capable of murder, and I believe that in the right (or rather wrong) circumstances, that is true. But this is a level of depravity that I cannot comprehend.
(On reflection, it's not totally unprecedented - similar examples exist from WW2 and before, and no doubt more recent conflicts too. Baffling to me though.)
You must read Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy. He describes in some detail the behavior of Japanese troops who had been left to die, and their indiscriminate raping and murdering of local civilians. It is genuinely shocking.
Human beings are capable of terrible evil.
Read Christina Lamb's "Our Bodies,Their Battlefields" - grim, very grim.
Or this from Janice Turner's article in the Times this weekend -
"In a new preface to her wide-ranging and grave book Our Bodies: Their Battlefield, Christina Lamb notes: “In the last eight years I have seen more sexual violence inflicted upon women by soldiers and militias than any other time in my 35-year career.”
She also reports that invading Russians filmed themselves raping Ukrainian women then posted it on porn sites. Maybe the two are connected. Was the choreographed depravity of Hamas in part men gleefully enacting a violent sexual template they’d absorbed online? Hamas footage is the ultimate revenge porn.
Rape, as Lamb notes drily, is not just an ancient weapon but a cheap one, which draws female non-combatants into an orbit of terror. Bullets are quotidian horrors compared to being gang-raped daily like the Nigerian girls stolen by Boko Haram or the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women”. One captured Hamas gunman said commanders ordered fighters to “sully” Israeli girls. God knows what female Israeli soldiers held hostage face deep below Gaza.
Yet for all the terror, damage and shame that war rape brings, it is seldom prosecuted. It is seen as trivial relative to other atrocities, more an unfortunate consequence of war than a human rights abuse."
The silence of so many human rights activists and feminist groups, the denial sends out a message to rapists that they will almost certainly get away with it.
And it's not just in war time. When I was doing my forensic science course as part of my barrister's training we had to see pictures of what being raped with a broken glass bottle does to a woman. That was in peacetime in this country.
What makes men do such things?
I think there’s an element of the population, for whom war and revolution offers the opportunity to enact their most depraved fantasies.
Groups like Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, RONA, the Ustasha in WWII, revelled in the opportunity to carry out the most vile acts, and they have their modern counterparts.
So, two years ago tomorrow is the last time the Tories were ahead in any poll.
6 Dec 2021, Redfield & Wilton, Con 38%, Lab 36%, LD 11%, Green 6%, RefUK 4%, SNP 4%.
I wonder when the next one will be?
Not all that long ago I expected that at least one poll would have Labour 10 points or fewer ahead of the Tories by Christmas. It rather looks as if this will not be the case.
11 is the closest they've got this calendar year. It's over 14 months since a single figure lead. At a week off four years, these aren't really mid-term polls any more.
So I haven't been paying much attention to British politics lately but apparently an actual sentence from it is "Farage will look at his options when he leaves the jungle".
She was alive," the witness says. "She was bleeding from her back."
She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim's body during the assault.
"They sliced her breast and threw it on the street," she says. "They were playing with it."
The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues.
"He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn't even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates."
AND, from the same report:
Another, Nachman Dyksztejna, provided written testimony of seeing the bodies of two women in kibbutz Be'eri with their hands and legs tied to a bed.
"One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed," his statement says.
-----------------
This is what Israelis are reading about. This is what they are learning was the fate of their young people. People they knew, and could well have been related to.
It's really impossible to see how there can be any meaningful ceasefire or cessation until the IDF has levelled Gaza. Israeli public opinion simply won't allow it.
What possesses people to commit such acts? I find it utterly beyond comprehension.
Are they drugged up? Are they orders of magnitude more evil than any person I have ever met (even the genuinely nasty people I've met)?
It's often said that anyone is capable of murder, and I believe that in the right (or rather wrong) circumstances, that is true. But this is a level of depravity that I cannot comprehend.
(On reflection, it's not totally unprecedented - similar examples exist from WW2 and before, and no doubt more recent conflicts too. Baffling to me though.)
You must read Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy. He describes in some detail the behavior of Japanese troops who had been left to die, and their indiscriminate raping and murdering of local civilians. It is genuinely shocking.
Human beings are capable of terrible evil.
Read Christina Lamb's "Our Bodies,Their Battlefields" - grim, very grim.
Or this from Janice Turner's article in the Times this weekend -
"In a new preface to her wide-ranging and grave book Our Bodies: Their Battlefield, Christina Lamb notes: “In the last eight years I have seen more sexual violence inflicted upon women by soldiers and militias than any other time in my 35-year career.”
She also reports that invading Russians filmed themselves raping Ukrainian women then posted it on porn sites. Maybe the two are connected. Was the choreographed depravity of Hamas in part men gleefully enacting a violent sexual template they’d absorbed online? Hamas footage is the ultimate revenge porn.
Rape, as Lamb notes drily, is not just an ancient weapon but a cheap one, which draws female non-combatants into an orbit of terror. Bullets are quotidian horrors compared to being gang-raped daily like the Nigerian girls stolen by Boko Haram or the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women”. One captured Hamas gunman said commanders ordered fighters to “sully” Israeli girls. God knows what female Israeli soldiers held hostage face deep below Gaza.
Yet for all the terror, damage and shame that war rape brings, it is seldom prosecuted. It is seen as trivial relative to other atrocities, more an unfortunate consequence of war than a human rights abuse."
The silence of so many human rights activists and feminist groups, the denial sends out a message to rapists that they will almost certainly get away with it.
And it's not just in war time. When I was doing my forensic science course as part of my barrister's training we had to see pictures of what being raped with a broken glass bottle does to a woman. That was in peacetime in this country.
What makes men do such things?
It completely baffles me.
I'd prefer you to say 'some men', indeed an extremely small proportion of men (one man is too many of course).
But I wonder if you believe all men, any man, is capable of these heinous act? I hope you don't.
So I haven't been paying much attention to British politics lately but apparently an actual sentence from it is "Farage will look at his options when he leaves the jungle".
I am no longer sure that any of this is real.
Someone seems to have let loose an Improbability Drive.
See also, '54% of GOP voters think Trump should run even if sent to prison'.
All of my close friends are female. A shockingly high proportion have been raped. The vast majority have been sexually assaulted. And all have a story of some kind of outlandishly outrageous male sexual behaviour. And that isn't in wartime.
NYT - Inside the Secret Meeting That Cleared the Way for Tom Suozzi’s Return
Gov. Kathy Hochul had been toying with blocking the former congressman’s nomination for the crucial special election to replace George Santos. Then a phone call came.
With his successor, George Santos, expelled from Congress, Tom Suozzi appeared to be on the brink of a full-scale comeback campaign on Monday. Then he got a worrisome request: Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted to see him. In Albany. Tonight.
Mr. Suozzi knew Ms. Hochul, a bitter rival, had been toying for weeks with trying to block him from becoming the Democratic nominee in a special election to replace Mr. Santos. So he cleared his schedule, fighting through three hours of rush-hour traffic to arrive at the Governor’s Mansion after nightfall.
Inside, Ms. Hochul presented Mr. Suozzi with multiple demands, according to two people briefed on the previously unreported meeting. She wanted to see his battle plan; needed the Roman Catholic former congressman to agree to run as a full-throated defender of abortion rights; and sought assurances that he would not run ads damaging their party’s brand.
Mr. Suozzi, 61, acceded to each request. Then he offered something else to soften the ground: an apology for aggressive personal tactics he deployed against Ms. Hochul in a 2022 primary campaign for governor, particularly for casting doubt on her family’s ethics.
The meeting amounted to an unusual flex of power from a governor who has typically preferred making friends over harboring grudges. But the assurances made room for a crucial détente that has cleared the way for party leaders to formally announce Mr. Suozzi as their candidate as soon as Thursday. . . .
Ms. Hochul declared separately on Tuesday that the special election would take place on Feb. 13.
It will be no easy fight. The district, which stretches from the outskirts of Queens through the affluent northern suburbs of Nassau County, voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 but has moved sharply rightward since amid voters’ concerns over crime and rising costs. Elections analysts rate it a tossup.
Republicans were still vetting more than a dozen candidates for their own nomination on Tuesday. Two front-runners had emerged, officials said: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.
Democrats nominally entertained other candidates in their own process, most notably Anna Kaplan, a state senator who had positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. . . .
But Mr. Suozzi long ago emerged as the ideal candidate for most party leaders. He held the seat for six years before relinquishing it to challenge Ms. Hochul, enjoys high name recognition and has a track record of bucking his party on issues like public safety and high taxes — positions that could help him win back voters who have flocked to Republicans. . . .
Given, as a Catholic, he acceded to Hochul’s request to be a fully fledged defender of abortion rights as well as seems desperate to get the nomination, I’m not sure I would bet a large amount of money on him “bucking the party” on other issues.
BTW, do you see Fetterman hired Santos to mock Mendelez?
All of my close friends are female. A shockingly high proportion have been raped. The vast majority have been sexually assaulted. And all have a story of some kind of outlandishly outrageous male sexual behaviour. And that isn't in wartime.
Men who rape / sexually assault are not just criminals but total losers.
However, the Hamas actions seem to have taken things to a new level of barbarity
This "continuously ahead" business. Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back. If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented. First time for everything, of course.
This "continuously ahead" business. Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back. If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented. First time for everything, of course.
I'm wondering about 1966-70. The polls were seriously out at the time of the GE (predicting a Labour majority) but Wikipedia doesn't seem to have polling for 66-70 listed for some reason.
Were Labour continuously ahead for two years during 66-70? I suspect not but can't be sure.
This "continuously ahead" business. Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back. If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented. First time for everything, of course.
I'm wondering about 1966-70. The polls were seriously out at the time of the GE (predicting a Labour majority) but Wikipedia doesn't seem to have polling for 66-70 listed for some reason.
Were Labour continuously ahead for two years during 66-70? I suspect not but can't be sure.
And were they continuously ahead by double figures for 14 months? That's the more significant metric for me, rather than merely leading.
All of my close friends are female. A shockingly high proportion have been raped. The vast majority have been sexually assaulted. And all have a story of some kind of outlandishly outrageous male sexual behaviour. And that isn't in wartime.
Men who rape / sexually assault are not just criminals but total losers.
However, the Hamas actions seem to have taken things to a new level of barbarity
No, not really.
They’d be considered entry level for the Dirlewanger Brigade.
There was a very useful TwiX thread yesterday (but unfortunately I can’t now find it). Particularly useful for betting purposes. It compared Reform polling in the current parliament with by-election votes, and then did the same comparison for UKIP during the 2010-15 parliament.
The contrast is striking. UKIP were scoring 12-13% in polls, but regularly hitting the 20s in Westminster byelections, and were winning lots of councillors.
Ref are on 9-11% in polls, not far behind 2010-15 UKIP, but they have only twice breached 5% in a Westminster by-election (in very Brexity Bexley and Sidcup, and Tamworth), generally getting 2-3%.
Conclusion: the polls are massively overstating Ref support (and I suspect green too).
By the same logic, if you are scoring on by-election percentages over 20%, and winning lots of councillors, the LDs must be massively understated in the polls?
This "continuously ahead" business. Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back. If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented. First time for everything, of course.
I'm wondering about 1966-70. The polls were seriously out at the time of the GE (predicting a Labour majority) but Wikipedia doesn't seem to have polling for 66-70 listed for some reason.
Were Labour continuously ahead for two years during 66-70? I suspect not but can't be sure.
And were they continuously ahead by double figures for 14 months? That's the more significant metric for me, rather than merely leading.
I'm not sure the 66-70 polls are worth considering, since the final polls were out by about 10-15%.
This "continuously ahead" business. Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back. If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented. First time for everything, of course.
I'm wondering about 1966-70. The polls were seriously out at the time of the GE (predicting a Labour majority) but Wikipedia doesn't seem to have polling for 66-70 listed for some reason.
Were Labour continuously ahead for two years during 66-70? I suspect not but can't be sure.
And were they continuously ahead by double figures for 14 months? That's the more significant metric for me, rather than merely leading.
I'm not sure the 66-70 polls are worth considering, since the final polls were out by about 10-15%.
The polls overstated the swing back to Labour, but the swing back was genuine.
This "continuously ahead" business. Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back. If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented. First time for everything, of course.
I'm wondering about 1966-70. The polls were seriously out at the time of the GE (predicting a Labour majority) but Wikipedia doesn't seem to have polling for 66-70 listed for some reason.
Were Labour continuously ahead for two years during 66-70? I suspect not but can't be sure.
Worth remembering that opinion polls were much rarer then.
This "continuously ahead" business. Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back. If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented. First time for everything, of course.
I'm wondering about 1966-70. The polls were seriously out at the time of the GE (predicting a Labour majority) but Wikipedia doesn't seem to have polling for 66-70 listed for some reason.
Were Labour continuously ahead for two years during 66-70? I suspect not but can't be sure.
Worth remembering that opinion polls were much rarer then.
Dark times.
Gone are the glory days of daily yougovs too, alas.
So, two years ago tomorrow is the last time the Tories were ahead in any poll.
6 Dec 2021, Redfield & Wilton, Con 38%, Lab 36%, LD 11%, Green 6%, RefUK 4%, SNP 4%.
I wonder when the next one will be?
Not all that long ago I expected that at least one poll would have Labour 10 points or fewer ahead of the Tories by Christmas. It rather looks as if this will not be the case.
11 is the closest they've got this calendar year. It's over 14 months since a single figure lead. At a week off four years, these aren't really mid-term polls any more.
No party that has been behind in every poll continuously for two years has ever won the subsequent GE.
Gosh. I was going to ask "what about '79 to '83?", but no, there was a poll in February 1981, and even if it was done by Outy McLierface from Outlier City, there was a Conservative lead.
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
So there's still a chance, I guess.
That alt-history 1983/4 GE where the Falklands had never been invaded is a tough one to call.
To be honest I don't think the Falklands made that much difference in spite of what people like to claim. The big factor that handed the election to Thatcher - or at least gave her a much bigger majority - was the split vote because of the emergence of the SDP. The Alliance got 25% in the 1983 election and there were a great many seats where they prevented Labour from winning.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
Anyone who believes anything Boris says, without strong corroborating evidence, is a mug.
Surely it's in Tice's own interest to help the Tories. If they are annihilated then the optics will be that the Great British public has thoroughly rejected right-wing politics, and Reform will be left looking even more irrelevant than they already are.
Not at all. There are several possible ways he can benefit:
1. If the Tories experience a Canada-style wipeout, RefUK can be a player in the subsequent realignment of the UK Right.
2. If the Tories experience a 1997-scale defeat, they will just as likely move to the centre as lurch to the right. If the former, RefUK will have the populist right to themselves.
3. If Labour win but require the support of LDs, Greens or SNP (either for their first term or to gain a second term) the prospect of ditching FPTP becomes a possibility again, which would benefit RefUK.
Are REFUK Libertarian? They strike me as quite authoritarian. For all his many faults Sunak is more Libertarian.
They certainly don't strike me as Libertarian with regard to their immigration policy. But then much of the Libertarian movement does seem to think that the freedoms they preach so loudly about should end at the border.
And remind me that my opinion of journalism schools has changed. A couple of decades ago, I said that a journalism degree should be considered a defect in the resume of someone you are considering hiring as a reporter. Now, I think those hiring reporters will save time by considering that degree a fatal defect. No doubt there are a few exceptions, but the pool of applicants is so large for almost any metropolitan newspaper that they can be ignored, without loss.
Near the end of the piece, the authors admit the truth: "None of this implies that a crisis of trust in the news is an illusion. NORC’s General Social Survey, which measures trust in institutions, finds that the news media and Congress share the lowest levels of confidence of any institutions in the country — below 10 percent report “a great deal” of confidence in either."
No party that has been behind in every poll continuously for two years has ever won the subsequent GE.
Gosh. I was going to ask "what about '79 to '83?", but no, there was a poll in February 1981, and even if it was done by Outy McLierface from Outlier City, there was a Conservative lead.
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
So there's still a chance, I guess.
That alt-history 1983/4 GE where the Falklands had never been invaded is a tough one to call.
To be honest I don't think the Falklands made that much difference in spite of what people like to claim. The big factor that handed the election to Thatcher - or at least gave her a much bigger majority - was the split vote because of the emergence of the SDP. The Alliance got 25% in the 1983 election and there were a great many seats where they prevented Labour from winning.
I think that's right: irrespective of any impact from victory in the Fawklands, the economy was improving, the left and center left was split, and neither the Davids nor Michael Foot were particularly credible.
Now, would Mrs Thatcher have achieved a 140-odd majority? Probably not, but I suspect it wouldn't have been far off the 100 mark irrespective.
(Of course, if you were to knock 20 seats off the Conservative total in 1983, they would mostly have gone Alliance, which might have had interesting long term consequences.)
She was alive," the witness says. "She was bleeding from her back."
She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim's body during the assault.
"They sliced her breast and threw it on the street," she says. "They were playing with it."
The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues.
"He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn't even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates."
AND, from the same report:
Another, Nachman Dyksztejna, provided written testimony of seeing the bodies of two women in kibbutz Be'eri with their hands and legs tied to a bed.
"One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed," his statement says.
-----------------
This is what Israelis are reading about. This is what they are learning was the fate of their young people. People they knew, and could well have been related to.
It's really impossible to see how there can be any meaningful ceasefire or cessation until the IDF has levelled Gaza. Israeli public opinion simply won't allow it.
What possesses people to commit such acts? I find it utterly beyond comprehension.
Are they drugged up? Are they orders of magnitude more evil than any person I have ever met (even the genuinely nasty people I've met)?
It's often said that anyone is capable of murder, and I believe that in the right (or rather wrong) circumstances, that is true. But this is a level of depravity that I cannot comprehend.
(On reflection, it's not totally unprecedented - similar examples exist from WW2 and before, and no doubt more recent conflicts too. Baffling to me though.)
You must read Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy. He describes in some detail the behavior of Japanese troops who had been left to die, and their indiscriminate raping and murdering of local civilians. It is genuinely shocking.
Human beings are capable of terrible evil.
Or the Japanese in Manchuria; or the Belgians in the Congo - just to take a couple of examples.
All societies contain individuals capable of such behaviour - and those who wouldn't be.
All of my close friends are female. A shockingly high proportion have been raped. The vast majority have been sexually assaulted. And all have a story of some kind of outlandishly outrageous male sexual behaviour. And that isn't in wartime.
Men who rape / sexually assault are not just criminals but total losers.
However, the Hamas actions seem to have taken things to a new level of barbarity
I wish that were true; sadly it has been all too common for women to be brutally raped en mass. The Germans did it to the Russians; the Russians did it to the Germans; the Imperial Japanese Army did it to the Koreans, the Chinese and the Filipinos. And the Russians have been doing it in Ukraine.
No party that has been behind in every poll continuously for two years has ever won the subsequent GE.
Gosh. I was going to ask "what about '79 to '83?", but no, there was a poll in February 1981, and even if it was done by Outy McLierface from Outlier City, there was a Conservative lead.
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
So there's still a chance, I guess.
That alt-history 1983/4 GE where the Falklands had never been invaded is a tough one to call.
To be honest I don't think the Falklands made that much difference in spite of what people like to claim. The big factor that handed the election to Thatcher - or at least gave her a much bigger majority - was the split vote because of the emergence of the SDP. The Alliance got 25% in the 1983 election and there were a great many seats where they prevented Labour from winning.
I think that's right: irrespective of any impact from victory in the Fawklands, the economy was improving, the left and center left was split, and neither the Davids nor Michael Foot were particularly credible.
Now, would Mrs Thatcher have achieved a 140-odd majority? Probably not, but I suspect it wouldn't have been far off the 100 mark irrespective.
(Of course, if you were to knock 20 seats off the Conservative total in 1983, they would mostly have gone Alliance, which might have had interesting long term consequences.)
I saw an analysis recently that suggested the idea that Thatcher won because of a split in the left/centre left was wrong. If you look at polling of the second choice of Alliance supporters, lots of them would have voted Tory otherwise.
NYT - Inside the Secret Meeting That Cleared the Way for Tom Suozzi’s Return
Gov. Kathy Hochul had been toying with blocking the former congressman’s nomination for the crucial special election to replace George Santos. Then a phone call came.
With his successor, George Santos, expelled from Congress, Tom Suozzi appeared to be on the brink of a full-scale comeback campaign on Monday. Then he got a worrisome request: Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted to see him. In Albany. Tonight.
Mr. Suozzi knew Ms. Hochul, a bitter rival, had been toying for weeks with trying to block him from becoming the Democratic nominee in a special election to replace Mr. Santos. So he cleared his schedule, fighting through three hours of rush-hour traffic to arrive at the Governor’s Mansion after nightfall.
Inside, Ms. Hochul presented Mr. Suozzi with multiple demands, according to two people briefed on the previously unreported meeting. She wanted to see his battle plan; needed the Roman Catholic former congressman to agree to run as a full-throated defender of abortion rights; and sought assurances that he would not run ads damaging their party’s brand.
Mr. Suozzi, 61, acceded to each request. Then he offered something else to soften the ground: an apology for aggressive personal tactics he deployed against Ms. Hochul in a 2022 primary campaign for governor, particularly for casting doubt on her family’s ethics.
The meeting amounted to an unusual flex of power from a governor who has typically preferred making friends over harboring grudges. But the assurances made room for a crucial détente that has cleared the way for party leaders to formally announce Mr. Suozzi as their candidate as soon as Thursday. . . .
Ms. Hochul declared separately on Tuesday that the special election would take place on Feb. 13.
It will be no easy fight. The district, which stretches from the outskirts of Queens through the affluent northern suburbs of Nassau County, voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 but has moved sharply rightward since amid voters’ concerns over crime and rising costs. Elections analysts rate it a tossup.
Republicans were still vetting more than a dozen candidates for their own nomination on Tuesday. Two front-runners had emerged, officials said: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.
Democrats nominally entertained other candidates in their own process, most notably Anna Kaplan, a state senator who had positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. . . .
But Mr. Suozzi long ago emerged as the ideal candidate for most party leaders. He held the seat for six years before relinquishing it to challenge Ms. Hochul, enjoys high name recognition and has a track record of bucking his party on issues like public safety and high taxes — positions that could help him win back voters who have flocked to Republicans. . . .
Given, as a Catholic, he acceded to Hochul’s request to be a fully fledged defender of abortion rights as well as seems desperate to get the nomination, I’m not sure I would bet a large amount of money on him “bucking the party” on other issues.
BTW, do you see Fetterman hired Santos to mock Mendelez?
Lots of Catholics disagree with the Church on abortion and contraception. The fertility rates in Spain and Italy aren’t that low because no-one’s for fornicating!
No party that has been behind in every poll continuously for two years has ever won the subsequent GE.
Gosh. I was going to ask "what about '79 to '83?", but no, there was a poll in February 1981, and even if it was done by Outy McLierface from Outlier City, there was a Conservative lead.
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
So there's still a chance, I guess.
That alt-history 1983/4 GE where the Falklands had never been invaded is a tough one to call.
To be honest I don't think the Falklands made that much difference in spite of what people like to claim. The big factor that handed the election to Thatcher - or at least gave her a much bigger majority - was the split vote because of the emergence of the SDP. The Alliance got 25% in the 1983 election and there were a great many seats where they prevented Labour from winning.
I think that's right: irrespective of any impact from victory in the Fawklands, the economy was improving, the left and center left was split, and neither the Davids nor Michael Foot were particularly credible.
Now, would Mrs Thatcher have achieved a 140-odd majority? Probably not, but I suspect it wouldn't have been far off the 100 mark irrespective.
(Of course, if you were to knock 20 seats off the Conservative total in 1983, they would mostly have gone Alliance, which might have had interesting long term consequences.)
I saw an analysis recently that suggested the idea that Thatcher won because of a split in the left/centre left was wrong. If you look at polling of the second choice of Alliance supporters, lots of them would have voted Tory otherwise.
I understand the point, but it boils down to "if things were different they would have voted differently". Well, yes, but they weren't.
NYT - Inside the Secret Meeting That Cleared the Way for Tom Suozzi’s Return
Gov. Kathy Hochul had been toying with blocking the former congressman’s nomination for the crucial special election to replace George Santos. Then a phone call came.
With his successor, George Santos, expelled from Congress, Tom Suozzi appeared to be on the brink of a full-scale comeback campaign on Monday. Then he got a worrisome request: Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted to see him. In Albany. Tonight.
Mr. Suozzi knew Ms. Hochul, a bitter rival, had been toying for weeks with trying to block him from becoming the Democratic nominee in a special election to replace Mr. Santos. So he cleared his schedule, fighting through three hours of rush-hour traffic to arrive at the Governor’s Mansion after nightfall.
Inside, Ms. Hochul presented Mr. Suozzi with multiple demands, according to two people briefed on the previously unreported meeting. She wanted to see his battle plan; needed the Roman Catholic former congressman to agree to run as a full-throated defender of abortion rights; and sought assurances that he would not run ads damaging their party’s brand.
Mr. Suozzi, 61, acceded to each request. Then he offered something else to soften the ground: an apology for aggressive personal tactics he deployed against Ms. Hochul in a 2022 primary campaign for governor, particularly for casting doubt on her family’s ethics.
The meeting amounted to an unusual flex of power from a governor who has typically preferred making friends over harboring grudges. But the assurances made room for a crucial détente that has cleared the way for party leaders to formally announce Mr. Suozzi as their candidate as soon as Thursday. . . .
Ms. Hochul declared separately on Tuesday that the special election would take place on Feb. 13.
It will be no easy fight. The district, which stretches from the outskirts of Queens through the affluent northern suburbs of Nassau County, voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 but has moved sharply rightward since amid voters’ concerns over crime and rising costs. Elections analysts rate it a tossup.
Republicans were still vetting more than a dozen candidates for their own nomination on Tuesday. Two front-runners had emerged, officials said: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.
Democrats nominally entertained other candidates in their own process, most notably Anna Kaplan, a state senator who had positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. . . .
But Mr. Suozzi long ago emerged as the ideal candidate for most party leaders. He held the seat for six years before relinquishing it to challenge Ms. Hochul, enjoys high name recognition and has a track record of bucking his party on issues like public safety and high taxes — positions that could help him win back voters who have flocked to Republicans. . . .
Given, as a Catholic, he acceded to Hochul’s request to be a fully fledged defender of abortion rights as well as seems desperate to get the nomination, I’m not sure I would bet a large amount of money on him “bucking the party” on other issues.
BTW, do you see Fetterman hired Santos to mock Mendelez?
Lots of Catholics disagree with the Church on abortion and contraception. The fertility rates in Spain and Italy aren’t that low because no-one’s for fornicating!
all this immigration policy change smacks of desperation. They knew the figures were going to be bad but only jump when the Daily Mail etc and Telegraph bleat.
Its going to have all sorts of implications over the next 6 months, none of them that helpful for the Tory elections strategy
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
But it's not just government communication apps, is it? It is everything.
Look at the way this stuff is being spun by all sides, and then bout how difficult it ill make actually trying to make decisions in the future. especially considering unpalatable options (even if they are rejected).
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
But it's not just government communication apps, is it? It is everything.
Look at the way this stuff is being spun by all sides, and then bout how difficult it ill make actually trying to make decisions in the future. especially considering unpalatable options (even if they are rejected).
The one definite result of the COVID enquiry is that everyone competent and sane will turn on the Message Expiry feature on their messaging apps.
Telegraph obituary of David Wilshire. Some Conservatives accused David Cameron of seizing the expenses scandal as an opportunity to clear out his backwoodsmen and Wilshire would certainly have been one with his opposition to homosexuality and the Good Friday Agreement but in any case it is hard to see how Wilshire could have remained in the Commons as his expenses claims bordered on, well, let's take the Telegraph's account:-
As the scandal over MPs’ expenses broke in May 2009, Wilshire’s local paper asked why he had claimed the maximum allowance for a second home in London when his constituency home was in the commuter belt. He replied: “In 22 years of living in London, I have always furnished the flat out of my own pocket.” Four days later the Telegraph revealed that he claimed thousands of pounds toward the cost of interior decoration for the flat, without having to submit receipts.
Questioned again by the local paper, he said he was “embarrassed, sad and sorry”; he had not yet spent the money allocated to him but would decorate the flat in the future, so would not be paying it back.
When it emerged that Wilshire had also spent over £1,000 of taxpayers’ money on furniture, contradicting his previous claims, he sent an explanatory email saying: “I obtained the cheapest self-assembly replacement available from MFI”. However he also said he had bought the flat four years earlier than he had previously said.
...
Further investigation by the Telegraph established that Wilshire had used parliamentary expenses to pay £105,000 over three years to Moorlands Research Services, a company he set up and owned with his partner Ann Palmer to run his office. He referred himself to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, telling the BBC the arrangement had been approved by the authorities and that the company had never made a profit and had been wound up. He equated his treatment over his expenses with the Holocaust, a statement for which he later apologised.
Next day, after a meeting with the Chief Whip, Wilshire announced that he would not be seeking re-election.
(btw I twice corrected the Telegraph's misspelling of Wilshire's name; so much for AI subbing!)
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
That would guarantee that all embarrassing messages would be irretrievably lost.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
Not only in Westminster. By some happy coincidence the same thing happened in the Scottish Regime of St Nicola.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
My old boss once sat next to Tracey Emin at a dinner.
How was she, I asked.
Possibly the most unpleasant person I've ever met, he replied.
Even the Guardian has decided the Turner Prize candidates were worthy and boring and woke
“It comes as little surprise that Jesse Darling has won the 2024 Turner Prize, among a shortlist that was otherwise socially committed, worthy, obtuse and overdone – not to mention a teensy bit dull”
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
That would guarantee that all embarrassing messages would be irretrievably lost.
No. Think. Use the skills we have available.
Make the DfE responsible for deleting all the messages and making sure they remain secret.
Telegraph obituary of David Wilshire. Some Conservatives accused David Cameron of seizing the expenses scandal as an opportunity to clear out his backwoodsmen and Wilshire would certainly have been one with his opposition to homosexuality and the Good Friday Agreement but in any case it is hard to see how Wilshire could have remained in the Commons as his expenses claims bordered on, well, let's take the Telegraph's account:-
As the scandal over MPs’ expenses broke in May 2009, Wilshire’s local paper asked why he had claimed the maximum allowance for a second home in London when his constituency home was in the commuter belt. He replied: “In 22 years of living in London, I have always furnished the flat out of my own pocket.” Four days later the Telegraph revealed that he claimed thousands of pounds toward the cost of interior decoration for the flat, without having to submit receipts.
Questioned again by the local paper, he said he was “embarrassed, sad and sorry”; he had not yet spent the money allocated to him but would decorate the flat in the future, so would not be paying it back.
When it emerged that Wilshire had also spent over £1,000 of taxpayers’ money on furniture, contradicting his previous claims, he sent an explanatory email saying: “I obtained the cheapest self-assembly replacement available from MFI”. However he also said he had bought the flat four years earlier than he had previously said.
...
Further investigation by the Telegraph established that Wilshire had used parliamentary expenses to pay £105,000 over three years to Moorlands Research Services, a company he set up and owned with his partner Ann Palmer to run his office. He referred himself to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, telling the BBC the arrangement had been approved by the authorities and that the company had never made a profit and had been wound up. He equated his treatment over his expenses with the Holocaust, a statement for which he later apologised.
Next day, after a meeting with the Chief Whip, Wilshire announced that he would not be seeking re-election.
(btw I twice corrected the Telegraph's misspelling of Wilshire's name; so much for AI subbing!)
How come a handful of high profile Labour MPs (quite rightly) went to prison, and people like Wilshire were never prosecuted? The £105,000 looks suspiciously like theft from the public purse. Let's not even enter the realms of duck houses and a married MP couple's mortgage arrangements.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
We need a judge-led inquiry into why government communications apps are not run and curated by the civil service.
Because such a system would be shit?
Obviously
But we need a 10,000 page report, after the fact, to tell us that. Proper Government, init?
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Depends.
If they employ their fat, lazy, stupid mates as senior figures and completely bugger up public services, they'll deserve the opprobrium.
If however they don't have a pandemic to demonstrate their intellectual feebleness, lack of moral courage and total incompetence they might get away with it.
That said, he may calculate that the effect of standing aside for tories is negligible. Maybe there's a chance Reform could replace the Tories as the opposition or even win in some constituencies.
That said, he may calculate that the effect of standing aside for tories is negligible. Maybe there's a chance Reform could replace the Tories as the opposition or even win in some constituencies.
There's a chance I could get a date with Margot Robbie. She's heterosexual, after all.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Labour do get a free pass because they were not in government. They and their WhatsApps are irrelevant in relation to how the COVID crisis was prosecuted.
Johnson and Sunak's WhatsApps are relevant, not least because, it would seems, that was their preferred channel for formal communication. There is no email trail because they used WhatsApp which seems wholly unsatisfactory. 150,000 people died (many according to Hancock last week unnecessarily). The inquiry needs to investigate whether national interest, or party, idealogical and personal interest were prioritised. Just because you like Boris and at every turn he has been called out for incompetence and heartlessness doesn't invalidate the inquiry or the necessity to learn from error.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Depends.
If they employ their fat, lazy, stupid mates as senior figures and completely bugger up public services, they'll deserve the opprobrium.
If however they don't have a pandemic to demonstrate their intellectual feebleness, lack of moral courage and total incompetence they might get away with it.
I'm thinking of the Iraq War in particular. That went into nowhere near as much detail of the lies made by Blair, Campbell and others in government. It would have been interesting to see that decision put under this sort of (ahem) (non)-forensic examination.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Depends.
If they employ their fat, lazy, stupid mates as senior figures and completely bugger up public services, they'll deserve the opprobrium.
If however they don't have a pandemic to demonstrate their intellectual feebleness, lack of moral courage and total incompetence they might get away with it.
I'm thinking of the Iraq War in particular. That went into nowhere near as much detail of the lies made by Blair, Campbell and others in government. It would have been interesting to see that decision put under this sort of (ahem) (non)-forensic examination.
Blair and Campbell used formal communications, which were examined. They were called out for their decisions and their justifications for the Iraq war. Blair's entire reputation was trashed for how he executed and justified his decision making.
Perhaps Blair should be languishing in a Hague war crimes prison, but we never got that far. On that same token, perhaps Johnson should be prosecuted for his negligence (hinted at, sorry blamed by Hancock) for his role in tens if thousands of unnecessary COVID fatalities.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Depends.
If they employ their fat, lazy, stupid mates as senior figures and completely bugger up public services, they'll deserve the opprobrium.
If however they don't have a pandemic to demonstrate their intellectual feebleness, lack of moral courage and total incompetence they might get away with it.
I'm thinking of the Iraq War in particular. That went into nowhere near as much detail of the lies made by Blair, Campbell and others in government. It would have been interesting to see that decision put under this sort of (ahem) (non)-forensic examination.
Blair and Campbell used formal communications, which were examined. They were called out for their decisions and their justifications for the Iraq war. Blair's entire reputation was trashed for how he executed and justified his decision making.
Perhaps Blair should be languishing in a Hague war crimes prison, but we never got that far. On that same token, perhaps Johnson should be prosecuted for his negligence (hinted at, sorry blamed by Hancock) for his role in tens if thousands of unnecessary COVID fatalities.
Bullshit. There would have been loads of chats and other conversations, as well as the 'formal' communications. These informal conversations are now being examined; and that is what has changed.
Look at it this way (and I don't expect you to, sadly): *you* are in Johnson's situation back in March 2020. You are not an expert in epidemics, or even medical matters. You ask questions of more knowledgeable people. Some of these questions appear dumb-assed with hindsight. What we'll get is politicians afraid to ask questions because they might be used against them in future.
One result of this will be more power to the civil service. Another will be worse government. Another will be an utter lack of preparedness, and action, when another emergency strikes.
She was alive," the witness says. "She was bleeding from her back."
She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim's body during the assault.
"They sliced her breast and threw it on the street," she says. "They were playing with it."
The victim was passed to another man in uniform, she continues.
"He penetrated her, and shot her in the head before he finished. He didn't even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates."
AND, from the same report:
Another, Nachman Dyksztejna, provided written testimony of seeing the bodies of two women in kibbutz Be'eri with their hands and legs tied to a bed.
"One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed," his statement says.
-----------------
This is what Israelis are reading about. This is what they are learning was the fate of their young people. People they knew, and could well have been related to.
It's really impossible to see how there can be any meaningful ceasefire or cessation until the IDF has levelled Gaza. Israeli public opinion simply won't allow it.
What possesses people to commit such acts? I find it utterly beyond comprehension.
Are they drugged up? Are they orders of magnitude more evil than any person I have ever met (even the genuinely nasty people I've met)?
It's often said that anyone is capable of murder, and I believe that in the right (or rather wrong) circumstances, that is true. But this is a level of depravity that I cannot comprehend.
(On reflection, it's not totally unprecedented - similar examples exist from WW2 and before, and no doubt more recent conflicts too. Baffling to me though.)
You must read Ian Toll's Pacific War trilogy. He describes in some detail the behavior of Japanese troops who had been left to die, and their indiscriminate raping and murdering of local civilians. It is genuinely shocking.
Human beings are capable of terrible evil.
Read Christina Lamb's "Our Bodies,Their Battlefields" - grim, very grim.
Or this from Janice Turner's article in the Times this weekend -
"In a new preface to her wide-ranging and grave book Our Bodies: Their Battlefield, Christina Lamb notes: “In the last eight years I have seen more sexual violence inflicted upon women by soldiers and militias than any other time in my 35-year career.”
She also reports that invading Russians filmed themselves raping Ukrainian women then posted it on porn sites. Maybe the two are connected. Was the choreographed depravity of Hamas in part men gleefully enacting a violent sexual template they’d absorbed online? Hamas footage is the ultimate revenge porn.
Rape, as Lamb notes drily, is not just an ancient weapon but a cheap one, which draws female non-combatants into an orbit of terror. Bullets are quotidian horrors compared to being gang-raped daily like the Nigerian girls stolen by Boko Haram or the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women”. One captured Hamas gunman said commanders ordered fighters to “sully” Israeli girls. God knows what female Israeli soldiers held hostage face deep below Gaza.
Yet for all the terror, damage and shame that war rape brings, it is seldom prosecuted. It is seen as trivial relative to other atrocities, more an unfortunate consequence of war than a human rights abuse."
The silence of so many human rights activists and feminist groups, the denial sends out a message to rapists that they will almost certainly get away with it.
And it's not just in war time. When I was doing my forensic science course as part of my barrister's training we had to see pictures of what being raped with a broken glass bottle does to a woman. That was in peacetime in this country.
What makes men do such things?
It completely baffles me.
I'd prefer you to say 'some men', indeed an extremely small proportion of men (one man is too many of course).
But I wonder if you believe all men, any man, is capable of these heinous act? I hope you don't.
Sadly I suspect it is a higher proportion than you or I would like to admit.
The cliched Milgram experiments indicate how willing most people are to inflict pain and suffering on others when it is sanctioned or encouraged by people in authority.
Combine that with the dehumanising effects of military training (unquestioned obedience, for example) and the influence of fundamentalist religious ideology and I suspect the proportion of men who would resist participating in a group act of this nature would be much smaller than we might hope.
There will be some, of course, indeed I imagine there were some in the ranks of Hamas, who resisted this depravity. But this is a deeper problem than a few fringe psychopaths imo.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Depends.
If they employ their fat, lazy, stupid mates as senior figures and completely bugger up public services, they'll deserve the opprobrium.
If however they don't have a pandemic to demonstrate their intellectual feebleness, lack of moral courage and total incompetence they might get away with it.
I'm thinking of the Iraq War in particular. That went into nowhere near as much detail of the lies made by Blair, Campbell and others in government. It would have been interesting to see that decision put under this sort of (ahem) (non)-forensic examination.
In fairness I remember the actual hearings were extremely damning and the evidence that was extracted was devastating. It was the final reports which were banal and refused to reach obvious conclusions.
Boris Johnson has been unable to supply the Covid-19 inquiry with any of his Whatsapp messages for almost the entirety of the first lockdown.
Johnson was advised to stop using his old phone in May 2021 after it emerged that his number had been freely available online for 15 years.
He was initially unable to hand over Whatsapp messages to the inquiry because he could not remember the passcode. Earlier this year he was able to access the device with the support of experts and it had been assumed the messages were passed on.
However, Johnson has told the inquiry that even with access to the device, experts were unable to retrieve any of his messages from January 31 to June 7, which covers a critical period from the run-up to the first Covid lockdown to the easing of restrictions. “The technical team has been unable to determine the cause of this,” he has told the inquiry.
Johnson said that the content of the messages was likely to have been provided by others. A source close to Johnson denied that he had deleted the messages. Rishi Sunak has separately told the inquiry that he no longer has access to Whatsapp messages from his time as chancellor.
Anyone who believes this sort of guff is a mug, it's about as plausible as the many MPs who have claimed to have been hacked whenever they were caught posting something offensive.
can you show me all your messages on every electronic forum, along with any written diaries or memos you may have made, in professional and personal capacities, over the last four years?
Cheers.
Anything that’s written will be there. As nobody deleted them. Everybody knows Johnson’s Whatsapp will be full of inappropriate, hubristic commentary. How convenient that they’ve been disappeared.
You can lose phones, or they can go wrong (I lost access to my old WhatsApp when my old phone went beserk, and would not transfer over data).
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
It’s surprisingly easy to lose WhatsApp messages. If your phone is lost or stolen you can lose months of chats - or entire archives. Or if your phone has a meltdown
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
That's rubbish. As you read below, it's absolutely impossible to accidentally lose messages. Impossible ... (/sarcasm)
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Depends.
If they employ their fat, lazy, stupid mates as senior figures and completely bugger up public services, they'll deserve the opprobrium.
If however they don't have a pandemic to demonstrate their intellectual feebleness, lack of moral courage and total incompetence they might get away with it.
I'm thinking of the Iraq War in particular. That went into nowhere near as much detail of the lies made by Blair, Campbell and others in government. It would have been interesting to see that decision put under this sort of (ahem) (non)-forensic examination.
In fairness I remember the actual hearings were extremely damning and the evidence that was extracted was devastating. It was the final reports which were banal and refused to reach obvious conclusions.
There is also “sofa government” - part of which was making decisions and deals without any kind of record.
Blair seemed to have an instinct about this. Remember that he had his expenses records shredded before he left No. 10
If anyone wants to know what Woke is, what it does, and why it is deeply, corrosively dangerous - point to this
The woke narrative of intersectionality and decolonialism ends with madness like this. And the potential destruction of American education
This is HARVARD. And MIT
I see your free speech absolutism lasted as long until you met an opinion you didn't agree with.
He is right on this one though, this is the mad side of woke and they are not fit for their office. They should be "cancelled" just as wackos on the opposite side can be cancelled too. It is "mad" that is bad not woke or anti-woke.
If anyone wants to know what Woke is, what it does, and why it is deeply, corrosively dangerous - point to this
The woke narrative of intersectionality and decolonialism ends with madness like this. And the potential destruction of American education
This is HARVARD. And MIT
I see your free speech absolutism lasted until you met an opinion you didn't agree with.
No, you fool, its the hypocrisy of Harvard - and the rest
They claim to be pro free speech but it’s total bullshit. They have rescinded offers to students who turn out to have made “racist memes”. They have cancelled students for “misgendering”. A Harvard professor actually had to resign for simply saying that sex is “biological and binary”
So they have no free speech defence. And does anyone seriously believe they would not intervene if students were marching around calling for the reintroduction of slavery of black people, or the slaughter of homosexuals? Would they worry about “context” then? Of course not
Comments
NYT - Inside the Secret Meeting That Cleared the Way for Tom Suozzi’s Return
Gov. Kathy Hochul had been toying with blocking the former congressman’s nomination for the crucial special election to replace George Santos. Then a phone call came.
With his successor, George Santos, expelled from Congress, Tom Suozzi appeared to be on the brink of a full-scale comeback campaign on Monday. Then he got a worrisome request: Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted to see him. In Albany. Tonight.
Mr. Suozzi knew Ms. Hochul, a bitter rival, had been toying for weeks with trying to block him from becoming the Democratic nominee in a special election to replace Mr. Santos. So he cleared his schedule, fighting through three hours of rush-hour traffic to arrive at the Governor’s Mansion after nightfall.
Inside, Ms. Hochul presented Mr. Suozzi with multiple demands, according to two people briefed on the previously unreported meeting. She wanted to see his battle plan; needed the Roman Catholic former congressman to agree to run as a full-throated defender of abortion rights; and sought assurances that he would not run ads damaging their party’s brand.
Mr. Suozzi, 61, acceded to each request. Then he offered something else to soften the ground: an apology for aggressive personal tactics he deployed against Ms. Hochul in a 2022 primary campaign for governor, particularly for casting doubt on her family’s ethics.
The meeting amounted to an unusual flex of power from a governor who has typically preferred making friends over harboring grudges. But the assurances made room for a crucial détente that has cleared the way for party leaders to formally announce Mr. Suozzi as their candidate as soon as Thursday. . . .
Ms. Hochul declared separately on Tuesday that the special election would take place on Feb. 13.
It will be no easy fight. The district, which stretches from the outskirts of Queens through the affluent northern suburbs of Nassau County, voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 but has moved sharply rightward since amid voters’ concerns over crime and rising costs. Elections analysts rate it a tossup.
Republicans were still vetting more than a dozen candidates for their own nomination on Tuesday. Two front-runners had emerged, officials said: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.
Democrats nominally entertained other candidates in their own process, most notably Anna Kaplan, a state senator who had positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. . . .
But Mr. Suozzi long ago emerged as the ideal candidate for most party leaders. He held the seat for six years before relinquishing it to challenge Ms. Hochul, enjoys high name recognition and has a track record of bucking his party on issues like public safety and high taxes — positions that could help him win back voters who have flocked to Republicans. . . .
Or this from Janice Turner's article in the Times this weekend -
"In a new preface to her wide-ranging and grave book Our Bodies: Their Battlefield, Christina Lamb notes: “In the last eight years I have seen more sexual violence inflicted upon women by soldiers and militias than any other time in my 35-year career.”
She also reports that invading Russians filmed themselves raping Ukrainian women then posted it on porn sites. Maybe the two are connected. Was the choreographed depravity of Hamas in part men gleefully enacting a violent sexual template they’d absorbed online? Hamas footage is the ultimate revenge porn.
Rape, as Lamb notes drily, is not just an ancient weapon but a cheap one, which draws female non-combatants into an orbit of terror. Bullets are quotidian horrors compared to being gang-raped daily like the Nigerian girls stolen by Boko Haram or the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women”. One captured Hamas gunman said commanders ordered fighters to “sully” Israeli girls. God knows what female Israeli soldiers held hostage face deep below Gaza.
Yet for all the terror, damage and shame that war rape brings, it is seldom prosecuted. It is seen as trivial relative to other atrocities, more an unfortunate consequence of war than a human rights abuse."
The silence of so many human rights activists and feminist groups, the denial sends out a message to rapists that they will almost certainly get away with it.
And it's not just in war time. When I was doing my forensic science course as part of my barrister's training we had to see pictures of what being raped with a broken glass bottle does to a woman. That was in peacetime in this country.
What makes men do such things?
But even then, it implies that Sunak's hopes rest on both winning a significant war and the opposition descending into a massive split and a suicide note of a manifesto. And soon.
So there's still a chance, I guess.
I think Man City will still win the league.
There is more chance of Elvis being found alive on the moon than Starmer/Reeves/McSweeney Labour writing a suicide manifesto.
It will be long on rhetoric, long on photos, very tight on some extreme specifics (e.g. VAT on private skools) and otherwise nothing to stop people who have already decided to vote these feckers out from pausing.
Which is entirely strategically sensible imho.
Rice and Havertz look like a great deal spent, but spent well.
This isn't the end of the season though. City come good then.
Groups like Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, RONA, the Ustasha in WWII, revelled in the opportunity to carry out the most vile acts, and they have their modern counterparts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67565498
It's over 14 months since a single figure lead.
At a week off four years, these aren't really mid-term polls any more.
I am no longer sure that any of this is real.
I'd prefer you to say 'some men', indeed an extremely small proportion of men (one man is too many of course).
But I wonder if you believe all men, any man, is capable of these heinous act? I hope you don't.
A better example is 1959-64: Labour were ahead in every poll from Feb 62 to mid-August 64 but still nearly contrived to lose the October 64 election.
See also, '54% of GOP voters think Trump should run even if sent to prison'.
A shockingly high proportion have been raped. The vast majority have been sexually assaulted. And all have a story of some kind of outlandishly outrageous male sexual behaviour.
And that isn't in wartime.
BTW, do you see Fetterman hired Santos to mock Mendelez?
However, the Hamas actions seem to have taken things to a new level of barbarity
Double figure leads were rarer (as were opinion polls), the further one goes back.
If Labour loses from here it will be unprecedented.
First time for everything, of course.
Were Labour continuously ahead for two years during 66-70? I suspect not but can't be sure.
That's the more significant metric for me, rather than merely leading.
They’d be considered entry level for the Dirlewanger Brigade.
The Tories gained boroughs like Hackney, Islington, Sheffield, Lambeth, Camden. Labour only retained Newman on the Mayor’s casting vote.
So no government has won, from the position the Tories are in, but Labour almost did in 1970.
Gone are the glory days of daily yougovs too, alas.
That headline is a fair summary of this opinion piece($): https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/05/americans-media-views-trust/
And remind me that my opinion of journalism schools has changed. A couple of decades ago, I said that a journalism degree should be considered a defect in the resume of someone you are considering hiring as a reporter. Now, I think those hiring reporters will save time by considering that degree a fatal defect. No doubt there are a few exceptions, but the pool of applicants is so large for almost any metropolitan newspaper that they can be ignored, without loss.
Near the end of the piece, the authors admit the truth: "None of this implies that a crisis of trust in the news is an illusion. NORC’s General Social Survey, which measures trust in institutions, finds that the news media and Congress share the lowest levels of confidence of any institutions in the country — below 10 percent report “a great deal” of confidence in either."
Now, would Mrs Thatcher have achieved a 140-odd majority? Probably not, but I suspect it wouldn't have been far off the 100 mark irrespective.
(Of course, if you were to knock 20 seats off the Conservative total in 1983, they would mostly have gone Alliance, which might have had interesting long term consequences.)
All societies contain individuals capable of such behaviour - and those who wouldn't be.
R
U
S
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Cometh the hour…
Football shouldn’t be in the Olympics, less so ‘Team GB’ - a nonsense.
Why are we ‘Team GB’ in the Olympics but not for any other major sport? Makes no sense.
Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first...
https://twitter.com/RepStefanik/status/1732138663608271149
Love the fact this pastiche soap-dodger's priority with the winnings is dentistry and (probably) to pay his rent:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67627980
Its going to have all sorts of implications over the next 6 months, none of them that helpful for the Tory elections strategy
And I *bet* that your data would contain "inappropriate, hubristic commentary"; unless you are a dry, humourless soul. Stuff that could be made to look embarrassing by any enemies.
What we are seeing with this inquiry is unprecedented, and IMO will negatively affect the way the country is run.
How was she, I asked.
Possibly the most unpleasant person I've ever met, he replied.
The Tories went over two years between poll leads, from March 2012 to May 2014 yet won the 2015 election.
Technically there were a few tied polls in 2013 but every non tied poll was a Labour lead.
Look at the way this stuff is being spun by all sides, and then bout how difficult it ill make actually trying to make decisions in the future. especially considering unpalatable options (even if they are rejected).
He stressed the need for integrity in government but his career was cut short after The Telegraph exposed his expenses claims
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2023/12/05/david-wilshire-mp-tory-section-28-obituary/ (£££)
Telegraph obituary of David Wilshire. Some Conservatives accused David Cameron of seizing the expenses scandal as an opportunity to clear out his backwoodsmen and Wilshire would certainly have been one with his opposition to homosexuality and the Good Friday Agreement but in any case it is hard to see how Wilshire could have remained in the Commons as his expenses claims bordered on, well, let's take the Telegraph's account:-
As the scandal over MPs’ expenses broke in May 2009, Wilshire’s local paper asked why he had claimed the maximum allowance for a second home in London when his constituency home was in the commuter belt. He replied: “In 22 years of living in London, I have always furnished the flat out of my own pocket.” Four days later the Telegraph revealed that he claimed thousands of pounds toward the cost of interior decoration for the flat, without having to submit receipts.
Questioned again by the local paper, he said he was “embarrassed, sad and sorry”; he had not yet spent the money allocated to him but would decorate the flat in the future, so would not be paying it back.
When it emerged that Wilshire had also spent over £1,000 of taxpayers’ money on furniture, contradicting his previous claims, he sent an explanatory email saying: “I obtained the cheapest self-assembly replacement available from MFI”. However he also said he had bought the flat four years earlier than he had previously said.
...
Further investigation by the Telegraph established that Wilshire had used parliamentary expenses to pay £105,000 over three years to Moorlands Research Services, a company he set up and owned with his partner Ann Palmer to run his office. He referred himself to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, telling the BBC the arrangement had been approved by the authorities and that the company had never made a profit and had been wound up. He equated his treatment over his expenses with the Holocaust, a statement for which he later apologised.
Next day, after a meeting with the Chief Whip, Wilshire announced that he would not be seeking re-election.
(btw I twice corrected the Telegraph's misspelling of Wilshire's name; so much for AI subbing!)
I’ve suffered both and it’s really annoying
“It comes as little surprise that Jesse Darling has won the 2024 Turner Prize, among a shortlist that was otherwise socially committed, worthy, obtuse and overdone – not to mention a teensy bit dull”
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/dec/05/he-almost-revels-in-our-social-collapse-jesse-darling-is-a-worthy-turner-prize-winner
Woke destroys everything it touches. Include modern art in that
Damien Hirst, for instance. I’ve met him a few times and he certainly doesnt strike me as a left wing firebrand
I'm *really* looking forward to Starmer's government having to operate under this new world. Except, of course, they'll rapidly try to make what's happened impossible to happen again. To them, at least...
(Incidentally, have Starmer's messages and correspondence had to be handed over to the inquiry? For the actions and words of the LotO also impact on a government's actions, and it may add context to what was happening. Or do Labour get a free pass?)
Make the DfE responsible for deleting all the messages and making sure they remain secret.
But we need a 10,000 page report, after the fact, to tell us that. Proper Government, init?
If they employ their fat, lazy, stupid mates as senior figures and completely bugger up public services, they'll deserve the opprobrium.
If however they don't have a pandemic to demonstrate their intellectual feebleness, lack of moral courage and total incompetence they might get away with it.
Cause/correlation klaxon sounds.
That said, he may calculate that the effect of standing aside for tories is negligible. Maybe there's a chance Reform could replace the Tories as the opposition or even win in some constituencies.
Johnson and Sunak's WhatsApps are relevant, not least because, it would seems, that was their preferred channel for formal communication. There is no email trail because they used WhatsApp which seems wholly unsatisfactory. 150,000 people died (many according to Hancock last week unnecessarily). The inquiry needs to investigate whether national interest, or party, idealogical and personal interest were prioritised. Just because you like Boris and at every turn he has been called out for incompetence and heartlessness doesn't invalidate the inquiry or the necessity to learn from error.
In what world is calling for the genocide of Jews okay but a believe in biological sex isn’t.
https://x.com/sfmcguire79/status/1732095835759063178?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
This testimony from a student is appalling.
https://x.com/bariweiss/status/1732128422027989269?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
Perhaps Blair should be languishing in a Hague war crimes prison, but we never got that far. On that same token, perhaps Johnson should be prosecuted for his negligence (hinted at, sorry blamed by Hancock) for his role in tens if thousands of unnecessary COVID fatalities.
In your view is having any opinion on anything that you don't particularly care for being "triggered " ?
My boy Dave then won the subsequent general election, another example of Dave's awesomeness.
Look at it this way (and I don't expect you to, sadly): *you* are in Johnson's situation back in March 2020. You are not an expert in epidemics, or even medical matters. You ask questions of more knowledgeable people. Some of these questions appear dumb-assed with hindsight. What we'll get is politicians afraid to ask questions because they might be used against them in future.
One result of this will be more power to the civil service. Another will be worse government. Another will be an utter lack of preparedness, and action, when another emergency strikes.
The cliched Milgram experiments indicate how willing most people are to inflict pain and suffering on others when it is sanctioned or encouraged by people in authority.
Combine that with the dehumanising effects of military training (unquestioned obedience, for example) and the influence of fundamentalist religious ideology and I suspect the proportion of men who would resist participating in a group act of this nature would be much smaller than we might hope.
There will be some, of course, indeed I imagine there were some in the ranks of Hamas, who resisted this depravity. But this is a deeper problem than a few fringe psychopaths imo.
🚨 Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn: “It's OK to call for genocide of Jews” 🤯
https://x.com/drelidavid/status/1732152952775639505?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
If anyone wants to know what Woke is, what it does, and why it is deeply, corrosively dangerous - point to this
The woke narrative of intersectionality and decolonialism ends with madness like this. And the potential destruction of American education
This is HARVARD. And MIT
Blair seemed to have an instinct about this. Remember that he had his expenses records shredded before he left No. 10
What is your definition of 'woke' ?
They claim to be pro free speech but it’s total bullshit. They have rescinded offers to students who turn out to have made “racist memes”. They have cancelled students for “misgendering”. A Harvard professor actually had to resign for simply saying that sex is “biological and binary”
So they have no free speech defence. And does anyone seriously believe they would not intervene if students were marching around calling for the reintroduction of slavery of black people, or the slaughter of homosexuals? Would they worry about “context” then? Of course not