But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
We will never experience the counterfactual, but the argument "BoZo didn't fuck up as badly as he might have done" is not a ringing endorsement
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
Going round a hospital doing his "I'm not afraid" act, next to medical staff wearing all their protective gear, was idiotic, childish faux-machismo. As well as sending out precisely the wrong message. He got the virus, and probably did more to spread it about his workplace than any other single person. The PPE charlatans were all his dodgy mates, and the full extent of the scandal has likely yet to be revealed. Yes, countries had to pick their own path between China and Sweden; we veered about like a shopping trolley; indeed it's surprising no-one has thought of that analogy for his decision-making before....
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
We will never experience the counterfactual, but the argument "BoZo didn't fuck up as badly as he might have done" is not a ringing endorsement
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
But you can make that argument for any process decision by a PM. Success and failure depends greatly on the information available to the decision-maker, and the systems and people who implement the decision. No PM micromanages every detail.
Your attitude appears to be: when things went wrong, it was all his fault. When they went right, it was other people.
But Corbyn... Corbyn was different. At a time when we needed jabs in arms, and that fucking piece of shit (*) refused to say if he had even had a vaccination. This is particularly tragic as many of his 'followers' were from demographics that were slow to take up the jabs. That will have cost lives.
As for how well we did: AFAIAA the data indicates we did not do as 'well' as some countries during Covid, and not as 'badly' as others. We were not uniquely god or bad. All countries faced similar problems, and all had different mechanisms, laws and processes they could work within, and others they could invent.
(*) Sorry for swearing @NickPalmer , but your friend is a piece of shit.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
Going round a hospital doing his "I'm not afraid" act, next to medical staff wearing all their protective gear, was idiotic, childish faux-machismo. He got the virus, and probably did more to spread it about his workplace than any other single person. The PPE charlatans were all his dodgy mates, and the full extent of the scandal has likely yet to be revealed. Yes, countries had to pick their own path between China and Sweden; we veered about like a shopping trolley; indeed it's surprising no-one has thought of that analogy for his decision-making before....
What a very selective memory you have about PPE charlatans. Some of us can still rememebr the Labour front bench getting all bent out of shape because the Government wasn't pursuing PPE contracts from people who, er, had no PPE.
There was an unedifying worldwide scrum to obtain PPE. We obtained it. Yes, there were some scammers and shysters and gougers. I am still in favour of tracking them down and pursuing them with the full vigour of the law - whichever side of the political divide they are on. But you outrage-ometer would have been set to 11 if the NHS had received no PPE.
What is this government doing to ensure we never face that crisis again? If it hasn't learnt lessons and ensuring we have additional capacity - even if it ends up being wasted because of use by dates - then it is failing us and will be in the same position as the Boris Johnson government when the next pandemic appears.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
Going round a hospital doing his "I'm not afraid" act, next to medical staff wearing all their protective gear, was idiotic, childish faux-machismo. He got the virus, and probably did more to spread it about his workplace than any other single person. The PPE charlatans were all his dodgy mates, and the full extent of the scandal has likely yet to be revealed. Yes, countries had to pick their own path between China and Sweden; we veered about like a shopping trolley; indeed it's surprising no-one has thought of that analogy for his decision-making before....
What a very selective memory you have about PPE charlatans. Some of us can still rememebr the Labour front bench getting all bent out of shape because the Government wasn't pursuing PPE contracts from people who, er, had no PPE.
There was an unedifying worldwide scrum to obtain PPE. We obtained it. Yes, there were some scammers and shysters and gougers. I am still in favour of tracking them down and pursuing them with the full vigour of the law - whichever side of the political divide they are on. But you outrage-ometer would have been set to 11 if the NHS had received no PPE.
WHat is this government doing to ensure we never face that crisis again? If it hasn't learnt lessons and ensuring we have additional capacity - even if it ends up being wasted because of use by dates - then it is failing us and will be in the same position as the Boris Johnson government when the next pandemic appears.
The dossier of potential providers that Labour put forward would have resulted in equal shit show. What we are now seeing with them in government, not doing their homework. Within hours of them waving it about, people looked up the names and it was basically all Delboy Trotters and worse, football agents !!!!
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
Going round a hospital doing his "I'm not afraid" act, next to medical staff wearing all their protective gear, was idiotic, childish faux-machismo. He got the virus, and probably did more to spread it about his workplace than any other single person. The PPE charlatans were all his dodgy mates, and the full extent of the scandal has likely yet to be revealed. Yes, countries had to pick their own path between China and Sweden; we veered about like a shopping trolley; indeed it's surprising no-one has thought of that analogy before....
The only way to win the lockdown game was to never reach the point where they were necessary. And the only way to do that was to manage lower-level restrictions so that the caseload was consistently sufficiently low. That required subtle steering of the grey area between 'let it rip' and 'lock them up'.
For whatever reason (dislike of restrictions? muscle memory of the 'herd immunity by infection' theory? incompetence?), Johnson couldn't do that.
Hence the paradox that the UK, despite the vaccine programme, despite a freedom-loving PM, had such damagingly long lockdowns.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Starmer was awful during COVID. Remember he also wanted every to test every time they left the house. He didn't have a single good suggestion of his own throughout, it was always I agree but I would have gone even harder / more restrictive (even when it was clear we had to live with it after everybody that would get vaccinated had been).
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
Going round a hospital doing his "I'm not afraid" act, next to medical staff wearing all their protective gear, was idiotic, childish faux-machismo. He got the virus, and probably did more to spread it about his workplace than any other single person. The PPE charlatans were all his dodgy mates, and the full extent of the scandal has likely yet to be revealed. Yes, countries had to pick their own path between China and Sweden; we veered about like a shopping trolley; indeed it's surprising no-one has thought of that analogy before....
The only way to win the lockdown game was to never reach the point where they were necessary. And the only way to do that was to manage lower-level restrictions so that the caseload was consistently sufficiently low. That required subtle steering of the grey area between 'let it rip' and 'lock them up'.
For whatever reason (dislike of restrictions? muscle memory of the 'herd immunity by infection' theory? incompetence?), Johnson couldn't do that.
Hence the paradox that the UK, despite the vaccine programme, despite a freedom-loving PM, had such damagingly long lockdowns.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
Going round a hospital doing his "I'm not afraid" act, next to medical staff wearing all their protective gear, was idiotic, childish faux-machismo. He got the virus, and probably did more to spread it about his workplace than any other single person. The PPE charlatans were all his dodgy mates, and the full extent of the scandal has likely yet to be revealed. Yes, countries had to pick their own path between China and Sweden; we veered about like a shopping trolley; indeed it's surprising no-one has thought of that analogy before....
The only way to win the lockdown game was to never reach the point where they were necessary. And the only way to do that was to manage lower-level restrictions so that the caseload was consistently sufficiently low. That required subtle steering of the grey area between 'let it rip' and 'lock them up'.
For whatever reason (dislike of restrictions? muscle memory of the 'herd immunity by infection' theory? incompetence?), Johnson couldn't do that.
Hence the paradox that the UK, despite the vaccine programme, despite a freedom-loving PM, had such damagingly long lockdowns.
Stitch in time and all that.
" Johnson couldn't do that."
Neither did virtually any other country.
"...had such damagingly long lockdowns."
Starmer wated more, longer, lockdowns.
Lockdowns weren't just damaging..they were completely ineffective and counterproductive as proven by the data..virus will still spread while economy and social norms collapse..🧐🥴
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
We will never experience the counterfactual, but the argument "BoZo didn't fuck up as badly as he might have done" is not a ringing endorsement
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
But you can make that argument for any process decision by a PM. Success and failure depends greatly on the information available to the decision-maker, and the systems and people who implement the decision. No PM micromanages every detail.
Your attitude appears to be: when things went wrong, it was all his fault. When they went right, it was other people.
But Corbyn... Corbyn was different. At a time when we needed jabs in arms, and that fucking piece of shit (*) refused to say if he had even had a vaccination. This is particularly tragic as many of his 'followers' were from demographics that were slow to take up the jabs. That will have cost lives.
As for how well we did: AFAIAA the data indicates we did not do as 'well' as some countries during Covid, and not as 'badly' as others. We were not uniquely god or bad. All countries faced similar problems, and all had different mechanisms, laws and processes they could work within, and others they could invent.
(*) Sorry for swearing @NickPalmer , but your friend is a piece of shit.
Yeah because Corbyn and Labour really, really hate massive state intervention.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
We will never experience the counterfactual, but the argument "BoZo didn't fuck up as badly as he might have done" is not a ringing endorsement
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
But you can make that argument for any process decision by a PM. Success and failure depends greatly on the information available to the decision-maker, and the systems and people who implement the decision. No PM micromanages every detail.
Your attitude appears to be: when things went wrong, it was all his fault. When they went right, it was other people.
But Corbyn... Corbyn was different. At a time when we needed jabs in arms, and that fucking piece of shit (*) refused to say if he had even had a vaccination. This is particularly tragic as many of his 'followers' were from demographics that were slow to take up the jabs. That will have cost lives.
As for how well we did: AFAIAA the data indicates we did not do as 'well' as some countries during Covid, and not as 'badly' as others. We were not uniquely god or bad. All countries faced similar problems, and all had different mechanisms, laws and processes they could work within, and others they could invent.
(*) Sorry for swearing @NickPalmer , but your friend is a piece of shit.
Yeah because Corbyn and Labour really, really hate massive state intervention.
Corbyn would never have embraced use of any private sector though....the vaccine task force and the dashboard were successes of public / private partnership. And so was the testing regime (despite a lot of moaning, it was actually pretty good outside of the odd day where 27 million people all wanted to test because their kids were going back to school).
Remember we couldn't 10k people a day when we stuck to that approach and the shit show of PHE were basically its too hard, we might be able to do a few more if you give us a few months. All my kit was gathering dust in universities and private sector labs.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
Oh dear, oh dear. A series of Johnsonian rewrites and it isn't eight thirty yet. What next? An airbrushing of Truss from history
Even if we agree that Starmer hasn't made the most sure-footed of starts I don't believe that allows us to transform Johnson into a Roosevelt or Mandela.quality Head of State.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Starmer would probably have locked us down earlier, which might have avoided the later ones. One of the problems with Boris was that the initial lockdown was late, despite the example of Covid rampaging across Europe, and later on the Christmas lockdown was delayed and then imposed at the last minute.
One of the problems with Boris was that the initial lockdown was late, despite the example of Covid rampaging across Europe, and later on the Christmas lockdown was delayed and then imposed at the last minute.
But, but, but, BoZo "got all the big calls right" didn't he?
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Starmer would probably have locked us down earlier, which might have avoided the later ones. One of the problems with Boris was that the initial lockdown was late, despite the example of Covid rampaging across Europe, and later on the Christmas lockdown was delayed and then imposed at the last minute.
Going earlier on a lockdown never saved you any further ones. COVID was just too transmissible and ever changing. It was going to keep coming back. What it might have done is flattened big spikes, reducing pressure on services and thus deaths. And I think earlier was better pre-vaccination when we didn't know what we were dealing with that was the right approach.
On the flip side, post-vaccination, the media, Starmer, the zero covid alternative SAGE, would have kept locking us down. Which would have been even more worse than the path we went down for that period.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
Going round a hospital doing his "I'm not afraid" act, next to medical staff wearing all their protective gear, was idiotic, childish faux-machismo. He got the virus, and probably did more to spread it about his workplace than any other single person. The PPE charlatans were all his dodgy mates, and the full extent of the scandal has likely yet to be revealed. Yes, countries had to pick their own path between China and Sweden; we veered about like a shopping trolley; indeed it's surprising no-one has thought of that analogy before....
The only way to win the lockdown game was to never reach the point where they were necessary. And the only way to do that was to manage lower-level restrictions so that the caseload was consistently sufficiently low. That required subtle steering of the grey area between 'let it rip' and 'lock them up'.
For whatever reason (dislike of restrictions? muscle memory of the 'herd immunity by infection' theory? incompetence?), Johnson couldn't do that.
Hence the paradox that the UK, despite the vaccine programme, despite a freedom-loving PM, had such damagingly long lockdowns.
Stitch in time and all that.
" Johnson couldn't do that."
Neither did virtually any other country.
"...had such damagingly long lockdowns."
Starmer wated more, longer, lockdowns.
Lockdowns weren't just damaging..they were completely ineffective and counterproductive as proven by the data..virus will still spread while economy and social norms collapse..🧐🥴
That’s nonsense. Lockdowns were very effective at stopping viral spread.
They are a last resort and we should have done better to avoid needing them, but they definitely do the job.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Starmer would probably have locked us down earlier, which might have avoided the later ones. One of the problems with Boris was that the initial lockdown was late, despite the example of Covid rampaging across Europe, and later on the Christmas lockdown was delayed and then imposed at the last minute.
And that was the grim paradox.
By wanting to avoid lockdowns, the UK government created conditions that made them longer.
Exquisite torture for a polity that operates on the basis that if you want something eloquently or loudly enough, it will happen.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Starmer would probably have locked us down earlier, which might have avoided the later ones. One of the problems with Boris was that the initial lockdown was late, despite the example of Covid rampaging across Europe, and later on the Christmas lockdown was delayed and then imposed at the last minute.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Starmer would probably have locked us down earlier, which might have avoided the later ones. One of the problems with Boris was that the initial lockdown was late, despite the example of Covid rampaging across Europe, and later on the Christmas lockdown was delayed and then imposed at the last minute.
When you say 'late', what do you mean?
Can I help?
He prevaricated for a week when the results from Italy were in. He either didn't read them appropriately or he was AWOL and missing Cobra meetings because he had better things to do.
I am willing to give the government a pass for the initial lockdown timing. There were so many differing opinions, concerns about how the public would react, how long the public would stick at it.
The Christmas one was too slow and no excuses. We knew the SP, we also knew that variant was looking worse and vaccines were coming on stream. That was an avoidable mistake.
And the nonsense tier plans were counterproductive as people just traveled to go and enjoy a lower tier and spread it. As was allowing foreign holidays in the summer, which brought back the winter wave that was so deadly.
And finally furlough went on too long. Once people were vaccinated, we need to learn to live with it, the vast majority of people just needed to get it over with. A lot of the problems we see now is that elongated period where we still acted like COVID could kill everybody, too long with people not working, kids not going to school / uni, etc.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Starmer would probably have locked us down earlier, which might have avoided the later ones. One of the problems with Boris was that the initial lockdown was late, despite the example of Covid rampaging across Europe, and later on the Christmas lockdown was delayed and then imposed at the last minute.
When you say 'late', what do you mean?
Can I help?
He prevaricated for a week when the results from Italy were in. He either didn't read them appropriately or he was AWOL and missing Cobra meetings because he had better things to do.
iirc George Osborne suggested Boris missed Cobra meetings because he was busy sorting out his publishing arrangements.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
Remember him christening ‘The Johnson Variant’ 🙄
That was particularly crass. I hope he winces whenever it gets mentioned.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
Counterfactuals are fine. We had a World beating response to COVID and Johnson invented the vaccines. I saw him on TV working on them in Oxford.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
We will never experience the counterfactual, but the argument "BoZo didn't fuck up as badly as he might have done" is not a ringing endorsement
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
But you can make that argument for any process decision by a PM. Success and failure depends greatly on the information available to the decision-maker, and the systems and people who implement the decision. No PM micromanages every detail.
Your attitude appears to be: when things went wrong, it was all his fault. When they went right, it was other people.
But Corbyn... Corbyn was different. At a time when we needed jabs in arms, and that fucking piece of shit (*) refused to say if he had even had a vaccination. This is particularly tragic as many of his 'followers' were from demographics that were slow to take up the jabs. That will have cost lives.
As for how well we did: AFAIAA the data indicates we did not do as 'well' as some countries during Covid, and not as 'badly' as others. We were not uniquely god or bad. All countries faced similar problems, and all had different mechanisms, laws and processes they could work within, and others they could invent.
(*) Sorry for swearing @NickPalmer , but your friend is a piece of shit.
Yeah because Corbyn and Labour really, really hate massive state intervention.
Corbyn appears to hate many things. Given his 'friends' in the Middle East and Ireland, his hate seems to be mainly for this country.
But again, what about the vaccines? Corbyn's behaviour during Covid wrt vaccines was reprehensible. What makes you think he would have behaved any differently if in power?
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
We simply do not know what anyone other than Boris would have done because no-one other than Boris had access to government briefings, data and advice. It seems bizarre to exonerate Boris on the grounds this was not perfect while condemning those who had not even that.
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
Counterfactuals are fine. We had a World beating response to COVID and Johnson invented the vaccines. I saw him on TV working on them in Oxford.
I don't think anyone has said we had a 'World beating response to COVID' or 'Johnson invented the vaccines'.
What I'm saying is that the mistakes that were made were mostly understandable given the situation and the knowledge at the time. Also, that we were far from alone in making poor decisions in the crisis.
(Johnson did not invent the vaccines, but the government did invest heavily in vaccine development, though. Including a lot of 'wasted' money on vaccines that did not work.)
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
We will never experience the counterfactual, but the argument "BoZo didn't fuck up as badly as he might have done" is not a ringing endorsement
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
But you can make that argument for any process decision by a PM. Success and failure depends greatly on the information available to the decision-maker, and the systems and people who implement the decision. No PM micromanages every detail.
Your attitude appears to be: when things went wrong, it was all his fault. When they went right, it was other people.
But Corbyn... Corbyn was different. At a time when we needed jabs in arms, and that fucking piece of shit (*) refused to say if he had even had a vaccination. This is particularly tragic as many of his 'followers' were from demographics that were slow to take up the jabs. That will have cost lives.
As for how well we did: AFAIAA the data indicates we did not do as 'well' as some countries during Covid, and not as 'badly' as others. We were not uniquely god or bad. All countries faced similar problems, and all had different mechanisms, laws and processes they could work within, and others they could invent.
(*) Sorry for swearing @NickPalmer , but your friend is a piece of shit.
Yeah because Corbyn and Labour really, really hate massive state intervention.
Corbyn appears to hate many things. Given his 'friends' in the Middle East and Ireland, his hate seems to be mainly for this country.
But again, what about the vaccines? Corbyn's behaviour during Covid wrt vaccines was reprehensible. What makes you think he would have behaved any differently if in power?
So have I got this right? Corbyn was responsible for all the bad calls on COVID and Johnson got all the big calls right?
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
We simply do not know what anyone other than Boris would have done because no-one other than Boris had access to government briefings, data and advice. It seems bizarre to exonerate Boris on the grounds this was not perfect while condemning those who had not even that.
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
Ah, Cummings. Someone who is apparently utterly untrustworthy when someone doesn't like what he says, but utterly trustworthy when he says something they like.
My own view on Cummings: everything he says is so distorted through a lens of his own self-interest that it is next to impossible to know the truth, if there is any. I ignore him, even when I agree.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
There really was a middle ground. An obvious middle ground. Standard boiler plate contract - we are paying x for y. If you do not deliver y there are penalty clauses allowing us to recoup the money.
The scandal is not the VIP lane - that's just normal Tory grift. The scandal is that we paid £107m contracts to grifters, received either unusable shite or nothing, and yet were happy for said grifter to keep our money.
I think the best example is the one where we paid the company for unusable out of spec not what was ordered PPE, and then paid them vast millions more to store it all.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
We will never experience the counterfactual, but the argument "BoZo didn't fuck up as badly as he might have done" is not a ringing endorsement
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
But you can make that argument for any process decision by a PM. Success and failure depends greatly on the information available to the decision-maker, and the systems and people who implement the decision. No PM micromanages every detail.
Your attitude appears to be: when things went wrong, it was all his fault. When they went right, it was other people.
But Corbyn... Corbyn was different. At a time when we needed jabs in arms, and that fucking piece of shit (*) refused to say if he had even had a vaccination. This is particularly tragic as many of his 'followers' were from demographics that were slow to take up the jabs. That will have cost lives.
As for how well we did: AFAIAA the data indicates we did not do as 'well' as some countries during Covid, and not as 'badly' as others. We were not uniquely god or bad. All countries faced similar problems, and all had different mechanisms, laws and processes they could work within, and others they could invent.
(*) Sorry for swearing @NickPalmer , but your friend is a piece of shit.
Yeah because Corbyn and Labour really, really hate massive state intervention.
Corbyn appears to hate many things. Given his 'friends' in the Middle East and Ireland, his hate seems to be mainly for this country.
But again, what about the vaccines? Corbyn's behaviour during Covid wrt vaccines was reprehensible. What makes you think he would have behaved any differently if in power?
So have I got this right? Corbyn was responsible for all the bad calls on COVID and Johnson got all the big calls right?
I'm happy with that.
I can't believe you'd get that from what I've said.
Corbyn had one minor responsibility. We needed jabs in arms. He had a following amongst groups where vaccine take-up was low. He refused to say if he had had the vaccine. Every other major politician made it clear they had.
That was the only major responsibility Corbyn had, and he failed.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
There really was a middle ground. An obvious middle ground. Standard boiler plate contract - we are paying x for y. If you do not deliver y there are penalty clauses allowing us to recoup the money.
The scandal is not the VIP lane - that's just normal Tory grift. The scandal is that we paid £107m contracts to grifters, received either unusable shite or nothing, and yet were happy for said grifter to keep our money.
I think the best example is the one where we paid the company for unusable out of spec not what was ordered PPE, and then paid them vast millions more to store it all.
I don't think that 'middle ground' existed, given the urgency of need, and the worldwide demand. It was a seller's market, and the sellers would have laughed at penalty clauses.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
We simply do not know what anyone other than Boris would have done because no-one other than Boris had access to government briefings, data and advice. It seems bizarre to exonerate Boris on the grounds this was not perfect while condemning those who had not even that.
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
Ah, Cummings. Someone who is apparently utterly untrustworthy when someone doesn't like what he says, but utterly trustworthy when he says something they like.
My own view on Cummings: everything he says is so distorted through a lens of his own self-interest that it is next to impossible to know the truth, if there is any. I ignore him, even when I agree.
Here is a complete list of Conservative Prime Ministers who could have reappointed Matt Hancock after he resigned not for any great financial scandal but for consensual snogging: Boris, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. None of them did.
ETA and I'm not sure many of Cummings' critics regard him as an unreliable witness, so much as just wrong and/or destructive.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
Counterfactuals are fine. We had a World beating response to COVID and Johnson invented the vaccines. I saw him on TV working on them in Oxford.
I don't think anyone has said we had a 'World beating response to COVID' or 'Johnson invented the vaccines'.
What I'm saying is that the mistakes that were made were mostly understandable given the situation and the knowledge at the time. Also, that we were far from alone in making poor decisions in the crisis.
(Johnson did not invent the vaccines, but the government did invest heavily in vaccine development, though. Including a lot of 'wasted' money on vaccines that did not work.)
I take your point that whoever was in power would’ve made mistakes and I have sympathy for decisions taken in the first few months.
However, there are other points your summary has overlooked. The pandemic planning before COVID-19 was poor, not helped by austerity and a focus on Brexit. The re-organisation of Public Health England into UKHSA in the middle of the crisis was bonkers, and Dido Harding was not a great choice of leader. The handling of Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle etc. was poor.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
We simply do not know what anyone other than Boris would have done because no-one other than Boris had access to government briefings, data and advice. It seems bizarre to exonerate Boris on the grounds this was not perfect while condemning those who had not even that.
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
Ah, Cummings. Someone who is apparently utterly untrustworthy when someone doesn't like what he says, but utterly trustworthy when he says something they like.
My own view on Cummings: everything he says is so distorted through a lens of his own self-interest that it is next to impossible to know the truth, if there is any. I ignore him, even when I agree.
We don't need to worry about the opinion of Cummings. We know precisely what went on inside Number 10 - utter utter chaos. Read Anthony Seldon's Johnson at 10, then come back and tell us with a straight face that Boris got Covid right.
Your other point is whataboutery - that Starmer would have been worse. Starmer was not an option - he only became leader during Covid. Corbyn absolutely would have been worse, on this like any other subject. But Starmer?
Actually go read up on what Boris did. Because most of his "achievements" had to be dragged out of him - late.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
We simply do not know what anyone other than Boris would have done because no-one other than Boris had access to government briefings, data and advice. It seems bizarre to exonerate Boris on the grounds this was not perfect while condemning those who had not even that.
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
Ah, Cummings. Someone who is apparently utterly untrustworthy when someone doesn't like what he says, but utterly trustworthy when he says something they like.
My own view on Cummings: everything he says is so distorted through a lens of his own self-interest that it is next to impossible to know the truth, if there is any. I ignore him, even when I agree.
Quite.
There should be a word for the varying reliability of a source, blending on whether you agree or disagree with them.
I think the most spectacular I’ve seen was from a distant relative who quoted Trump to make a point - he (the relative) makes @Cicero look pro MAGA, most of the time.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
We simply do not know what anyone other than Boris would have done because no-one other than Boris had access to government briefings, data and advice. It seems bizarre to exonerate Boris on the grounds this was not perfect while condemning those who had not even that.
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
Ah, Cummings. Someone who is apparently utterly untrustworthy when someone doesn't like what he says, but utterly trustworthy when he says something they like.
My own view on Cummings: everything he says is so distorted through a lens of his own self-interest that it is next to impossible to know the truth, if there is any. I ignore him, even when I agree.
We don't need to worry about the opinion of Cummings. We know precisely what went on inside Number 10 - utter utter chaos. Read Anthony Seldon's Johnson at 10, then come back and tell us with a straight face that Boris got Covid right.
Your other point is whataboutery - that Starmer would have been worse. Starmer was not an option - he only became leader during Covid. Corbyn absolutely would have been worse, on this like any other subject. But Starmer?
Actually go read up on what Boris did. Because most of his "achievements" had to be dragged out of him - late.
I've never said Starmer would have been worse. I have used his statement to show that he would have made bad decisions as well. Perhaps fewer bad decisions; perhaps more. We don't know. But bad decisions regardless.
As for 'chaos' in Number 10 - I bet there was 'chaos' in every single government as they faced Covid. The systems and processes simply are not set up to deal with a crisis of that magnitude, anywhere. The secret was in how the chaos was managed.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
Counterfactuals are fine. We had a World beating response to COVID and Johnson invented the vaccines. I saw him on TV working on them in Oxford.
I don't think anyone has said we had a 'World beating response to COVID' or 'Johnson invented the vaccines'.
What I'm saying is that the mistakes that were made were mostly understandable given the situation and the knowledge at the time. Also, that we were far from alone in making poor decisions in the crisis.
(Johnson did not invent the vaccines, but the government did invest heavily in vaccine development, though. Including a lot of 'wasted' money on vaccines that did not work.)
I take your point that whoever was in power would’ve made mistakes and I have sympathy for decisions taken in the first few months.
However, there are other points your summary has overlooked. The pandemic planning before COVID-19 was poor, not helped by austerity and a focus on Brexit. The re-organisation of Public Health England into UKHSA in the middle of the crisis was bonkers, and Dido Harding was not a great choice of leader. The handling of Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle etc. was poor.
Yep, I'll accept all those - with a slight caveat in that my understanding was that we did have pandemic planning, just not for this pandemic. But I bet we can point at *any* country and see similar mistakes.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
There really was a middle ground. An obvious middle ground. Standard boiler plate contract - we are paying x for y. If you do not deliver y there are penalty clauses allowing us to recoup the money.
The scandal is not the VIP lane - that's just normal Tory grift. The scandal is that we paid £107m contracts to grifters, received either unusable shite or nothing, and yet were happy for said grifter to keep our money.
I think the best example is the one where we paid the company for unusable out of spec not what was ordered PPE, and then paid them vast millions more to store it all.
I don't think that 'middle ground' existed, given the urgency of need, and the worldwide demand. It was a seller's market, and the sellers would have laughed at penalty clauses.
We would have ended up with little.
You’re right.
I was sourcing and managing PPE for our business at the time, Demand just exponentially increased without the requisite increase in supply. A complete sellers market and established companies (mainly distributors who deal with this) would not sign up to terms especially when they could not guarantee supply.
The other thing to bear in mind would be lots of new companies popped up dealing with this. Try enforcing a contract on them when they fold the business post pandemic as happened.
People were securing what they could from where they could get it.
Also worth saying Stuff that is out of spec does not mean it cannot be used. It would just need risk assessing first to see if it could be used. We used a fair bit of out of spec PPE against concessions after risk assessment, and everyone blames the govt, natch, however NHS Providers have a great deal of culpability too.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
There really was a middle ground. An obvious middle ground. Standard boiler plate contract - we are paying x for y. If you do not deliver y there are penalty clauses allowing us to recoup the money.
The scandal is not the VIP lane - that's just normal Tory grift. The scandal is that we paid £107m contracts to grifters, received either unusable shite or nothing, and yet were happy for said grifter to keep our money.
I think the best example is the one where we paid the company for unusable out of spec not what was ordered PPE, and then paid them vast millions more to store it all.
I don't think that 'middle ground' existed, given the urgency of need, and the worldwide demand. It was a seller's market, and the sellers would have laughed at penalty clauses.
We would have ended up with little.
You’re right.
I was sourcing and managing PPE for our business at the time, Demand just exponentially increased without the requisite increase in supply. A complete sellers market and established companies (mainly distributors who deal with this) would not sign up to terms especially when they could not guarantee supply.
The other thing to bear in mind would be lots of new companies popped up dealing with this. Try enforcing a contract on them when they fold the business post pandemic as happened.
People were securing what they could from where they could get it.
Also worth saying Stuff that is out of spec does not mean it cannot be used. It would just need risk assessing first to see if it could be used. We used a fair bit of out of spec PPE against concessions after risk assessment, and everyone blames the govt, natch, however NHS Providers have a great deal of culpability too.
Remember also that a French firm was contracted before Covid to provide millions of items of PPE if there was a pandemic. They welched on that agreement, as they could sell the PPE for more elsewhere. And that was just one egregious case.
I do not underrate Farage’s popularity at all. And I think he’s got a very strong chance of PM.
But I don’t underrate SKS’s chances either. The majority of PB seems to have decided he’s a dud six months after winning a landslide.
The numbers don’t look good for SKS
That trend line is rather similar to Gordon Brown, but never as popular and even faster descent.
If you just looked at those graphs, you’d imagine that Johnson was the exception, who appears to have been very successful. Yet he was the one who had to resign having been utterly discredited.
That is a) because had a bit of a cult like Trump who think he is great regardless* and b) if they hadn't got rid when thy did he would have ended up there once high inflation etc kicked in.
* his downfall was started with the handling of parliamentary affairs, I don't think the public followed much of how he tried to bend the rules to get his mates off. And his cult followers probably went bloody civil servants partying, Boris wasn't (the fact he clearly gave them the nod and then lying about it, as I say like Trump, he has cult like believers).
I do laugh at the Johnson hatred. He was a poor PM, and that was obvious from well before he became PM. He was brought down by his own personal failings. But, as keeps on being said, he got Covid vaccines and Ukraine right - two massive calls, and faced a situation with Covid that no PM would have emerged from looking good.
But many people still see Blair as, if not a brilliant PM, a good one. Yet he was not brought down by the disaster of Iraq; he kept on giving twice-sacked Mandelson jobs; and his wife associated with dodgy people. Too many Blairite fans ignore these, and other, failings.
And as for Starmer: it is evident he likes freebies: but that's hardly an uncommon failing. He could still end up being a good PM, even after a rocky start. But his fans should acknowledge when he makes mistakes, instead of covering their ears and going la-la-la-la.
Johnson didn’t get COVID right, at all. His initial response was a complacent “nothing to worry about”, going round the hospital deliberately touching everything and everyone, whereupon he and a shedload of his staff promptly came down with the virus themselves; inside Downing Street he was a superspreader. Every account of his decision-making reveals someone who vacillated this way and that, unable to reconcile his own instinctive disregard for rules with the need to impose strict restrictions on society, and the on-off flip-flopping over Christmas and over the schools reopening were risible and did tremendous damage. His media performances were generally pitiful. He turned PPE procurement into such a scandalous fiasco that, when the need to procure vaccines came along, he was read the riot act by senior officials and scientists and told to keep his and his greedy chums’ mitts off the whole exercise - hence that bit actually went rather well, despite, not because of, our useless PM.
He probably only got Ukraine right because he was in a panic about his own Russian connections during the period immediately prior.
That attitude was very common at the beginning of Covid - and not just in the UK. People were in disbelief. The first lockdown was a massive and unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties, however much it was required (and it was).
PPE procurement was always going to be a disaster: you would end up either not getting any, or paying money to charlatans. There really was no middle ground, however much people pretend otherwise.
I might remind you of Starmer calling for *more* and *longer* lockdowns, which I think are now seen as bad calls. Johnson was not the only person making bad calls at that time; it was just that he was in power.
But as I've said passim: thank goodness Corbyn wasn't in charge during Covid. Johnson was a giant in comparison.
There really was a middle ground. An obvious middle ground. Standard boiler plate contract - we are paying x for y. If you do not deliver y there are penalty clauses allowing us to recoup the money.
The scandal is not the VIP lane - that's just normal Tory grift. The scandal is that we paid £107m contracts to grifters, received either unusable shite or nothing, and yet were happy for said grifter to keep our money.
I think the best example is the one where we paid the company for unusable out of spec not what was ordered PPE, and then paid them vast millions more to store it all.
I don't think that 'middle ground' existed, given the urgency of need, and the worldwide demand. It was a seller's market, and the sellers would have laughed at penalty clauses.
We would have ended up with little.
You’re right.
I was sourcing and managing PPE for our business at the time, Demand just exponentially increased without the requisite increase in supply. A complete sellers market and established companies (mainly distributors who deal with this) would not sign up to terms especially when they could not guarantee supply.
The other thing to bear in mind would be lots of new companies popped up dealing with this. Try enforcing a contract on them when they fold the business post pandemic as happened.
People were securing what they could from where they could get it.
Also worth saying Stuff that is out of spec does not mean it cannot be used. It would just need risk assessing first to see if it could be used. We used a fair bit of out of spec PPE against concessions after risk assessment, and everyone blames the govt, natch, however NHS Providers have a great deal of culpability too.
Remember also that a French firm was contracted before Covid to provide millions of items of PPE if there was a pandemic. They welched on that agreement, as they could sell the PPE for more elsewhere. And that was just one egregious case.
Exactly and what would they do ? Sue for breach of contract. Not likely and the French firm could just invoke Force Majeure.
No sandwiches for Kemi's mentor, interviewer and Spectator boss Michael Gove.
You'd be entitled to a little discretion from Sheekey if they are charging £79 for a dozen oysters
Exactement. What a fucking rip-off
I had superb oysters in Vancouver for a third the price, and Vancouver is not cheap
I think part of the reason for expensive oysters is the fear of home preparation: the sharp knives and danger of stabbing. Once over that they’re pretty good options to have at home. Cluny market just before Christmas or new year: huge boxes of Breton oysters, at least a couple of kilos, for a few Euros. Plus cheap as chips lemon, vinegar, shallots and some very reasonably priced muscadet.
The price of oysters in London is, in general, ridiculous
In Cornwall you can easily get them for £1-2 a pop. Yummy
The tabloids and the Telegrunt will be having some fun; she's called Lola. She also seems to have quite the focus on "Wokeness in Music Education".
The Kinks brought to life:
Well, we drank champagne and danced all night Under electric candlelight She picked me up and sat me on her knee And said "Dear boy, won't you come home with me?" Well, I'm not the world's most passionate guy But when I looked in her eyes, well I almost fell for my Lola La-la-la-la Lola La-la-la-la Lola Lola La-la-la-la Lola La-la-la-la Lola
The COVID call Boris did get right, Omicron. The experts, the media, politicians etc were again screaming for lockdowns against this wildly new mega variant, and he stuck his neck out and said no, no more, we have to live with it.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Starmer would have locked us down for an additional Christmas, remember.
So would Johnson but for Sunak and Javid rebelling.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Look, I've been a critic of Johnson from long before it was popular. It's just that the criticisms of him become so utterly unhinged and stupid that I feel the need to give a little balance.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
We simply do not know what anyone other than Boris would have done because no-one other than Boris had access to government briefings, data and advice. It seems bizarre to exonerate Boris on the grounds this was not perfect while condemning those who had not even that.
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
Ah, Cummings. Someone who is apparently utterly untrustworthy when someone doesn't like what he says, but utterly trustworthy when he says something they like.
My own view on Cummings: everything he says is so distorted through a lens of his own self-interest that it is next to impossible to know the truth, if there is any. I ignore him, even when I agree.
Here is a complete list of Conservative Prime Ministers who could have reappointed Matt Hancock after he resigned not for any great financial scandal but for consensual snogging: Boris, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. None of them did.
ETA and I'm not sure many of Cummings' critics regard him as an unreliable witness, so much as just wrong and/or destructive.
Yes, he is definitely an unreliable witness. He’s so self-centred and arrogant that he bends perception around reality to forge entirely false narratives.
He is, ultimately, a less than intelligent man who has spectacularly failed in all actual jobs he has attempted while doing a lot of harm en route.
But he still thinks of himself as a great genius who is ousted because everyone is jealous of his awesomeness.
His lying about lockdown breaking was merely a curiously overt example of that.
The case mentioned upthread with the Fedex Flight was a former marine with the laser sight of his Sniper Rifle. It's what happens when guns aren't regulated and they get into the hands of idiots.
The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.
Daylight savings time is a complete shambles in America where each state does its own thing ....
Sort of. The states can make requests, but ultimately the federal government has to approve what they do. The responsible agency is the Department of Transportation, a legacy of when the pressure for uniform time came from the railroads.
And it's not entirely state-based - 15 states have more than one time zone.
Anyway, it's slightly confusing, but surely not a COMPLETE mess, as America seems to survive somehow.
In 2018, California voted by ballot proposition to abolish Daylight Savings Time and the Trump administration blocked its implementation!
Is that not just Chump through and through?
He spent years wazzocking on about dealing with "THE BORDER", but when they propose doing it he gets his drones in Congress to vote it down because a worse problem existing benefits him politically, personally.
Comments
BoZo was in hospital for at least part of it. I don't think he was making decisions than which suggests at least some of our "success" was due to the machinery of Government not specifically tied to any one PM
Why oh why did you have to say Brook is the world’s greatest batsman?
First ball duck…
About the only thing more embarrassing is that twit Nohit Sharma still captaining India because his sponsors are matey with the chief selector.
Maybe stopped clock and all that.
Your attitude appears to be: when things went wrong, it was all his fault. When they went right, it was other people.
But Corbyn... Corbyn was different. At a time when we needed jabs in arms, and that fucking piece of shit (*) refused to say if he had even had a vaccination. This is particularly tragic as many of his 'followers' were from demographics that were slow to take up the jabs. That will have cost lives.
As for how well we did: AFAIAA the data indicates we did not do as 'well' as some countries during Covid, and not as 'badly' as others. We were not uniquely god or bad. All countries faced similar problems, and all had different mechanisms, laws and processes they could work within, and others they could invent.
(*) Sorry for swearing @NickPalmer , but your friend is a piece of shit.
In the UK they are 4 wheel steer. In the US they are 2 wheel steer. Nightmare...
There was an unedifying worldwide scrum to obtain PPE. We obtained it. Yes, there were some scammers and shysters and gougers. I am still in favour of tracking them down and pursuing them with the full vigour of the law - whichever side of the political divide they are on. But you outrage-ometer would have been set to 11 if the NHS had received no PPE.
What is this government doing to ensure we never face that crisis again? If it hasn't learnt lessons and ensuring we have additional capacity - even if it ends up being wasted because of use by dates - then it is failing us and will be in the same position as the Boris Johnson government when the next pandemic appears.
For whatever reason (dislike of restrictions? muscle memory of the 'herd immunity by infection' theory? incompetence?), Johnson couldn't do that.
Hence the paradox that the UK, despite the vaccine programme, despite a freedom-loving PM, had such damagingly long lockdowns.
Stitch in time and all that.
Neither did virtually any other country.
"...had such damagingly long lockdowns."
Starmer wated more, longer, lockdowns.
Take away his shoes as well.
Remember we couldn't 10k people a day when we stuck to that approach and the shit show of PHE were basically its too hard, we might be able to do a few more if you give us a few months. All my kit was gathering dust in universities and private sector labs.
Even if we agree that Starmer hasn't made the most sure-footed of starts I don't believe that allows us to transform Johnson into a Roosevelt or Mandela.quality Head of State.
Apart from all the ones he didn't, obviously...
On the flip side, post-vaccination, the media, Starmer, the zero covid alternative SAGE, would have kept locking us down. Which would have been even more worse than the path we went down for that period.
They are a last resort and we should have done better to avoid needing them, but they definitely do the job.
By wanting to avoid lockdowns, the UK government created conditions that made them longer.
Exquisite torture for a polity that operates on the basis that if you want something eloquently or loudly enough, it will happen.
He prevaricated for a week when the results from Italy were in. He either didn't read them appropriately or he was AWOL and missing Cobra meetings because he had better things to do.
The Christmas one was too slow and no excuses. We knew the SP, we also knew that variant was looking worse and vaccines were coming on stream. That was an avoidable mistake.
And the nonsense tier plans were counterproductive as people just traveled to go and enjoy a lower tier and spread it. As was allowing foreign holidays in the summer, which brought back the winter wave that was so deadly.
And finally furlough went on too long. Once people were vaccinated, we need to learn to live with it, the vast majority of people just needed to get it over with. A lot of the problems we see now is that elongated period where we still acted like COVID could kill everybody, too long with people not working, kids not going to school / uni, etc.
Much anger from the investment industry who would have benefitted
https://www.ft.com/content/d102526a-787a-42cb-b56c-d545d5ea81be
Starmer got COVID all wrong, Johnson got all the big calls right.
Time to brush off that portfolio of unsold bridges.
Boris Derangement Syndrome works at both ends of the spectrum: those who are immensely loyal, and those who think he is the devil incarnate. Neither is true. He was a poor PM at a time we needed a great PM.
My line throughout Covid was that I was glad I was not the one making the decisions, as they would get pilloried for those decisions afterwards, whatever happened. And as we see with Corbyn and Starmer; they did not have to make directly life-and-death decisions, and still made poor decisions. Even a great PM would have made bad decisions, because we did not have the data or foreknowledge to make the right decisions. Many of these criticisms are coming from hindsight.
As a counterfactual, I'd argue that Starmer would have kept us in lockdowns for far longer than was required, and would have wound PPE procurement into such laborious processes that we would not have got any.
Remind me Rachel, who put that burden on UK business in the first place?
But again, what about the vaccines? Corbyn's behaviour during Covid wrt vaccines was reprehensible. What makes you think he would have behaved any differently if in power?
Since you raise procurement, see also Dominic Cummings on what a liability Matt Hancock was at Health, and why he was kept away from vaccines.
What I'm saying is that the mistakes that were made were mostly understandable given the situation and the knowledge at the time. Also, that we were far from alone in making poor decisions in the crisis.
(Johnson did not invent the vaccines, but the government did invest heavily in vaccine development, though. Including a lot of 'wasted' money on vaccines that did not work.)
I'm happy with that.
My own view on Cummings: everything he says is so distorted through a lens of his own self-interest that it is next to impossible to know the truth, if there is any. I ignore him, even when I agree.
The scandal is not the VIP lane - that's just normal Tory grift. The scandal is that we paid £107m contracts to grifters, received either unusable shite or nothing, and yet were happy for said grifter to keep our money.
I think the best example is the one where we paid the company for unusable out of spec not what was ordered PPE, and then paid them vast millions more to store it all.
What next? Brexit - good or bad?
Corbyn had one minor responsibility. We needed jabs in arms. He had a following amongst groups where vaccine take-up was low. He refused to say if he had had the vaccine. Every other major politician made it clear they had.
That was the only major responsibility Corbyn had, and he failed.
We would have ended up with little.
ETA and I'm not sure many of Cummings' critics regard him as an unreliable witness, so much as just wrong and/or destructive.
However, there are other points your summary has overlooked. The pandemic planning before COVID-19 was poor, not helped by austerity and a focus on Brexit. The re-organisation of Public Health England into UKHSA in the middle of the crisis was bonkers, and Dido Harding was not a great choice of leader. The handling of Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle etc. was poor.
NEW THREAD
Your other point is whataboutery - that Starmer would have been worse. Starmer was not an option - he only became leader during Covid. Corbyn absolutely would have been worse, on this like any other subject. But Starmer?
Actually go read up on what Boris did. Because most of his "achievements" had to be dragged out of him - late.
There should be a word for the varying reliability of a source, blending on whether you agree or disagree with them.
I think the most spectacular I’ve seen was from a distant relative who quoted Trump to make a point - he (the relative) makes @Cicero look pro MAGA, most of the time.
As for 'chaos' in Number 10 - I bet there was 'chaos' in every single government as they faced Covid. The systems and processes simply are not set up to deal with a crisis of that magnitude, anywhere. The secret was in how the chaos was managed.
I was sourcing and managing PPE for our business at the time, Demand just exponentially increased without the requisite increase in supply. A complete sellers market and established companies (mainly distributors who deal with this) would not sign up to terms especially when they could not guarantee supply.
The other thing to bear in mind would be lots of new companies popped up dealing with this. Try enforcing a contract on them when they fold the business post pandemic as happened.
People were securing what they could from where they could get it.
Also worth saying Stuff that is out of spec does not mean it cannot be used. It would just need risk assessing first to see if it could be used. We used a fair bit of out of spec PPE against concessions after risk assessment, and everyone blames the govt, natch, however NHS Providers have a great deal of culpability too.
To state otherwise is just laughable.
The Kinks brought to life:
Well, we drank champagne and danced all night
Under electric candlelight
She picked me up and sat me on her knee
And said "Dear boy, won't you come home with me?"
Well, I'm not the world's most passionate guy
But when I looked in her eyes, well I almost fell for my Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzrYXcXweI
Keir Starmer (LAB): 28%
Kemi Badenoch (CON): 23%
via @Moreincommon_, 6-10 Dec
https://x.com/OprosUK/status/1868274664457535764
He is, ultimately, a less than intelligent man who has spectacularly failed in all actual jobs he has attempted while doing a lot of harm en route.
But he still thinks of himself as a great genius who is ousted because everyone is jealous of his awesomeness.
His lying about lockdown breaking was merely a curiously overt example of that.
That's quite cherry-picked, I'd say. Here's the whole rounded interview: English with Dutch subtitles:
https://youtu.be/CPiV7yWVq74?t=34
eg https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-68838349
The case mentioned upthread with the Fedex Flight was a former marine with the laser sight of his Sniper Rifle. It's what happens when guns aren't regulated and they get into the hands of idiots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71LvY-AnyUE
He spent years wazzocking on about dealing with "THE BORDER", but when they propose doing it he gets his drones in Congress to vote it down because a worse problem existing benefits him politically, personally.