Tag Archives: Boris Johnson

For Rishi Sunak, it IS over – but not because of Reform UK or Lee Anderson

Lee Anderson: he’s a big supporter of Boris Johnson (left) so he may well be enjoying the turmoil stirred up by Johnson supporters in the Conservative Party as a result of his defection to Reform UK.

How ridiculous – but it’s fun watching the Tories tearing strips off each other:

Supporters of Boris Johnson have launched a fresh bid to oust Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after MP Lee Anderson joined Reform UK, the party founded by Nigel Farage.

David Campbell Bannerman, the Chair of the Conservative Democracy Organisation, told Times Radio it was “over” for Mr Sunak as he claimed a further nine Tory MPs are considering defecting. “Rishi is to blame directly for this and Conservative MPs must wake up now or die politically,” said the former MEP who is a staunch supporter of Mr Johnson. “They must get letters in and remove Rishi rapidly. [It] can be done in one week. Only then can we turn things around.”

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

The New Conservatives, a group of right wing Tories that Mr Anderson had been part of, said: “The responsibility for Lee’s defection sits with the Conservative Party… We cannot pretend any longer that ‘the plan is working’. We need to change course urgently.”

Anderson himself is a supporter of Boris Johnson and it is likely that he is hugely enjoying the turbulence he has caused.

But This writer doesn’t think he’ll trigger mass defections to Reform UK.

The former Brexit Party only had half as many votes as the Tories in the Rochdale by-election, and that was an extraordinarily low turnout for the most successful political party in the UK’s history.

Tory MPs know that most people vote tribally – for the brand, rather than the candidate* – and will believe they should stay put, whatever the result at the next general election.

And Boris Johnson remains as far from returning to the Tory leadership as ever.

Tory grandees know that Johnson has lost the confidence of the electorate; based on all the evidence, we think he’s a liar and a crook. He won’t be winning any more elections for them.

*This Writer is trying to change that situation. Voters should judge candidates in their constituencies based on who they are and what they offer, rather than on which party they represent. It is tribal voting that has brought the UK to its current historic low point.

Source: Boris Johnson supporters tell Rishi Sunak ‘it’s over’ as nine more Tory MPs in talks to defect – Mirror Online


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

We’ve long known Boris Johnson stopped Russia-Ukraine peace. Why is it news now?

Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin: it seems claims that Johnson flew to Kiev in April 2022, to scupper a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, were true. For how many deaths does that make Johnson responsible?

Why is this news?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a television interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in which he claimed – well, here’s someone who puts it better than I could:

Here’s a report that puts a little more meat on the bones:

But there’s one problem with the reporting here: all this was known, around a year and a half ago!

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

This Site published an article about it – that, of course, hardly anybody read. It included this video clip, which provided a source for the information:

Some of you might pooh-pooh Jimmy Dore as a poor source of information, even though he was quoting another journalist – but in any case it seems the story has been confirmed by Putin himself.

Call him a poor source of information if you like, but how many separate sources do you need before this claim becomes credible?

I think Boris Johnson has some serious questions to answer. Again.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Boris Johnson was elected in 2019 to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Why are we still waiting for the benefits?

Cliffhanger: The Leave campaign infamously claimed Brexit would result in a £350m a week dividend for the UK. We never received it. Instead, Brexit has shrunk the UK economy by at least 4%, costing a huge amount of working time simply to do the new paperwork it has foisted on us.

Brexit – that was a huge con, wasn’t it?

The Conservatives swept to a landslide victory in December 2019 under the slogan “Get Brexit Done” – and we are still waiting for it to happen.

Instead of the massive boost to the economy that we were promised, along with a bonfire of bureaucratic paperwork, UK importers and exporters have been deluged with such a mountain of new documentation to fill out, simply to get goods across the Channel, that the then-new government has had to “stagger” its implementation and some of it has still not started to affect us.

And Brexit jeopardised the whole Northern Ireland peace process by putting a trade border with the province in the middle of the Irish Sea – an imaginary barrier that will remain there even after the latest attempt to forge agreement over it between the disparate political organisations that have a stake in the matter.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

Brexit was the first subject This Site discussed after the general election and I was justifiably disparaging:

The Tories – not just under Boris Johnson, but going back through Theresa May’s nightmare leadership and right back to David Cameron’s horror show – have used their puppets in the mass media to change it from a debate on our future relationship with the European Union into a divisive standoff, pitting family against family, old against young, cosmopolitan against parochial.

And they succeeded, I think partly because they had dragged the process out so long that people were sick of the whole thing.

Labour’s promise to have a decisive answer within six months was unpalatable compared with Johnson’s lie that he’ll have it all sewn up by the end of January. People want it to be over now.

And I made a prediction that proved to be exactly right – didn’t it? See:

Well, I’ve got news for those people: it won’t be.

Johnson might be promising a vote in Parliament on his Withdrawal Bill on Friday, which will enable to UK to leave the EU on January 31, but of course that’s not the end of the saga. The country’s decoupling will take many years.

How right I was!

But the deal on which MPs will be voting will put us into a “transition” period, with the UK assumed to be clear of the EU by December 31, 2020 – and a top EU official says that won’t happen.

In a leaked recording, Michel Barnier said it would be “unrealistic” to expect a “global negotiation” on trade to be completed within 11 months, meaning that in fact we are likely to leave the EU with no deal.

How right he was!

It will make it possible for Johnson to sell off our remaining national assets. And the nearly 14 million people who voted Conservative on December 12? They’ll be remembered as the patsies who made it possible.

Well, they haven’t all gone – yet.

But the Tories will keep trying. And we know what privatisation brings: corruption, greed and profiteering, a sharp drop in the quality of service, and increasing demand on the public purse to pay for it all.

You can look forward to that under either a returned Tory government under Rishi Sunak or a new New Labour government under Keir Starmer and his Tories-in-red-ties.

That’s why This Site is campaigning for voters to do something different at this year’s general election – and actually engage your brains.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably repeat it many times:

You simply cannot vote tribally – for the party you think represents you (none of them do; they’re all about enriching their MPs and nothing else) – at the next general election.

Instead – and I cannot stress this strongly enough – if you want your vote to mean anything, you have to actually find out what the candidates in your constituency are planning to do, if they are lucky enough to be elected.

That is what party manifestos are for. Independent candidates also have policy documents and they will all be online for you to find and read.

You need to find and read these policy documents, and then you need to make a dispassionate choice, based on what you have read.

Which of the candidates offers the most policies that fit what you need? And, by that, I mean: who will improve your own life the most?

Do not consider how other people will vote, either in your constituency or the other 649 around the UK. That is not your concern.

It is not for you to worry about which party will get enough votes to actually enact its policies. This will lead you down the usual garden path to voting in a government that won’t do anything at all for the good of the country, like the one we’ve had since 2010.

BE SELFISH. Bizarrely, it might be the only way to get the kind of government that all of us need. It might even help us climb out of the Brexit pit into which Johnson, Cameron and all the other Tory twits dumped us.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Will Nicola Sturgeon enjoy renewed popularity over WhatsApp descriptions of Tories?

Take pride in it: is Nicola Sturgeon brandishing the finger with which she texted the claim that Liz Truss was as “useful as a marzipan dildo” on WhatsApp? Sadly not.

This Writer never had much time for Nicola Sturgeon – until now. What a shame she’s being praised for something that isn’t true but is from a parody account.

The SNP politician was ordered to disclose the contents of WhatsApp messages she sent during the Covid-19 crisis. What she said about Boris Johnson was bad enough – but a parody ‘X’ account took the story, ran with it, and brought joy to the nation:

Why would anybody want her to apologise for saying these things? This Writer reckons that if Sturgeon really had said them, she should have had a medal!

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

I’m stealing the description of Suella Braverman, by the way. It’s only her first initial and the name of the foreign politician whose politics seem to most closely resemble her own.

Sadly, @PoliticoForYou is a parody account and the story isn’t true – apart from what Sturgeon said about Boris Johnson.

So it’s still bad news for him, after he tried to tell the Covid Inquiry in December that he got on well with Sturgeon and they had a good relationship. This may have been true in their interactions, but clearly her own opinion of him wasn’t as he described.

More details of the real WhatsApp messages are available (in watered-down form) here on the BBC News website.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

#BorisJohnson makes warning about national security: is he having a laugh? #KeirStarmer #Yemen

Boris Johnson and Evgeny Lebedev: the UK’s Foreign Secretary (at the time) has partied with a former KGB agent. What right does he think he has to say anybody else is a security risk?

Boris Johnson is calling the Labour Party, and particularly Keir Starmer, a national security risk at a time of aggression with Yemen:

As you can hear on the clip, Johnson has written an article in the Heil.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

If you don’t want to visit that rag’s website (and who could blame you?) then Zelo Street has analysed it as follows:

Thus the headline “Sir Keir voted to ditch our alliance with the Saudis, which would have allowed Houthi rebels to wreak even more destruction… Starmer needs to tell us why on earth we should trust Labour with our security”. As usual, you have no need to read the supporting article, with the usual Bozo rambling stream of consciousness, as you’ve been told what to think.

But here’s a hint or two of Tedious Maximus in full-ish flow: “Well, the Houthis had it coming. We had no choice but to act … Of course, there will be qualms. People in Britain will be anxious for what follows. But the lesson is clear. You cannot turn your back on a region. You cannot just disengage from problems and hope that they will not affect you in the future”.

Like, oh I dunno, Afghanistan, perhaps? But do go on. “The spate of Houthi attacks on shipping, if it continues, has the potential to do incalculable damage to the world economy – and to the UK … There was … intensified pressure on the UK government to rescind the historic agreements between Britain and Saudi Arabia – signed under Margaret Thatcher – and stop the flow of arms and military support to Riyadh”. Getting to the point yet?

One evening, October 26, 2016, all five opposition parties voted to stop supporting the Saudis and to end the military relationship … Look at those MPs who voted in 2016 to axe the UK-Saudi relationship, and let the Houthis get on with it. There’s Yvette Cooper, and Emily Thornberry, and oh yes, of course, there’s the member for Holborn and St Pancras, Sir Keir Starmer”.

Nearly there. “He was totally wrong. He was voting against the interests of the UK’s long-term partners, and effectively in favour of the Houthis … He should explain. He should also explain why on earth we should trust Labour with our security”. Boris Johnson calls security risk on someone else. Ri-i-i-ight.

But Keir Starmer supported the airstrikes on the Houthi. That fact alone undermines Johnson’s entire argument. And then we have to consider Johnson’s own record:

Here’s the Guardianfrom 2019: “A trip Boris Johnson made to Italy for a party held by a billionaire socialite ended with the then foreign secretary at an airport ‘looking like he had slept in his clothes’, struggling to walk in a straight line and telling other passengers he had had a heavy night”.

And where had Bozo been, allegedly without his security detail? Palazzo Terranova, owned by Yevgeny Lebedev, son of a “former” KGB officer. Except that you never leave the KGB, or its successor agency, the FSB. As John Sweeney spelt it out in a video [HERE], UK security agencies were not happy.

So Boris Johnson, because of his private life, was a security risk. And may still be one:

Pot, kettle, black? No – it’s worse than that, because Boris Johnson has held a position of power in the UK and may have used it to benefit his Russian friends, as far as we know.

He’s in no position to warn of what might happen if the UK electorate forget Starmer’s support of genocide (which Johnson also, tacitly, supports by supporting the airstrikes against Yemen). He has already been in a position to do what he’s warning Starmer may.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Bad days for Boris Johnson: his Covid inquiry evidence is shredded

Boris Johnson: after his evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry, does he belong behind bars?

If you were to watch the TV news, you might think Boris Johnson was making a good fist of it.

The BBC’s report, below, turns out to have been … charitable, at worst – although there is an appendix providing views of his critics:

But it seems quite a lot of information was missed out. That’s hardly surprising when he was in the chair for six hours during the first day, but perhaps it would have been better to use the limited broadcast time to cover the facts, rather than show clips of him waffling.

Today, Yr Obdt Srvt (that’s me) went to the social media. Here’s some of what I found:

So he read hardly any of the scientific information and advice on offer to him.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

Then there’s this:

Why wasn’t that broadcast at the top of the news on December 6, 2023? It tells us everything we needed to know about Johnson’s leadership and attitude to people who were likely to become ill with Covid-19: let them die.

And how about this?

So, with Covid-19 cases rising, Johnson – and Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister, remember – decided to launch a scheme that was guaranteed to increase them still more. I believe research suggests a rise of up to 17 per cent was triggered this way.

And, despite protestations that they knew nothing about the scheme, Johnson insisted that his chief scientific and medical advisers were aware of it, and then said he thought in September 2020 that it was odd they hadn’t. Hugo Keith put him straight – at length:

That was all yesterday – and could have been highlighted in TV news reports. Why wasn’t it?

Moving on to today…

If anyone can make that make sense – in any way other than that Johnson was trying to cover his then-prime ministerial derriere against disasters – they are better than This Writer.

First he said one thing, then another, then he tried to blur the positions… This was not the behaviour of a man with a clear position and nothing to hide.

And now, some comedy. It’s kind of “gallows humour”, but in hard times you have to take what you can get, and Boris Johnson having a mental collapse trying to dissociate himself from using the phrase “let the virus rip”, seems likely to be the best for which we can hope:

The implication by Mr Keith – that Johnson’s belief that the people most likely to die were at the end of their lives anyway coloured his decisions on how to combat Covid-19 – seems fair. And nothing that Johnson said is remotely persuasive of the opposite.

In an attempt to regain some credibility, Johnson talked about his time in hospital, after contracting the virus, to show that he did care about what happened to those who caught it:

Are you persuaded?

From there, the inquiry turned to the extra-curricular activities enjoyed by Johnson’s advisers and staff while the rest of us were being kept in our homes.

Here’s his evidence on Dominic Cummings’s visit to Barnard Castle, over which he supported Cummings at the time:

And now let’s hear what he had to say about Partygate – the parties that took place in Downing Street on his watch:

His reference to civil servants “who thought they were following the rules” just makes it seem they must have been extremely dim-witted. The citizens of the UK expect a higher standard of intelligence from their public servants, alongside a higher standard of behaviour.

Now watch him get cornered with a question on whether he could have done more to stop the parties:

Johnson said in his evidence that “the public has the wrong impression of Partygate” – but it seems clear that much of the public has the right impression of what he has been saying over the last two days. Let’s have a smattering:

Here’s an opinion piece from The Guardian:

In it, Martin Kettle states:

Johnson suffers from a fatal combination of qualities in any leader. He combines indifference to principles and disregard for others with disorganisation of mind and behaviour, and indecisiveness and laziness in action.

It is the reckless incompetence and manifest unsuitability that stand out most.

But this is perhaps the most common question remaining in the public mind after the last two days:

Is there an avenue by which Johnson may be charged with criminal wrongdoing over the way he handled Covid-19?

If so, then yes – he should be prosecuted. Although I would leave it to the experts to determine the actual charge.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Evasions and ‘apologies’: Boris Johnson at the Covid inquiry

Boris Johnson at the Covid inquiry: expansive hand gestures and facial expressions can’t hide the lack of remorse.

Boris Johnson seems to have taken part of his strategy for giving evidence to the Covid inquiry from Harry Potter.

In the fifth book of JK Rowling’s celebrated children’s series, the title character is accused of a crime and his trial is brought forward in an attempt to ensure that his head teacher is unable to attend in time and give evidence.

Today (December 6, 2023), Johnson arrived at the inquiry’s venue no less than three hours early, in an attempt to evade critics – hecklers, bereaved family members of those who died, and so on.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

In this, he appears to have succeeded. All he had to avoid on the street were questions from the press:

It didn’t stop him from being heckled while giving his evidence:

While the inquiry’s chair was right to have the hecklers removed – they were disrupting proceedings, their interruption highlighted the lack of any real apology in Johnson’s statement.

Here’s Professor Tim Wilson:

He’s right. The apology was “Sorry you’re not happy,” rather than “I apologise for my failure”.

The questions he faced seem to have been primarily about WhatsApp messages that passed between the then-prime minister, his advisers and staff during 2020 – in particular, those that went missing from a phone he stopped using on the pretext that it was a security risk.

After it was unlocked, technicians appear to have discovered that a “factory reset” was performed on that phone in January 2020, and then an attempt was made to put back the information that had been removed at that time in June of that year. Johnson denied knowledge of what a “factory reset” was, implying that he had nothing to do with this alleged activity.

Do you believe him?

In the event, it seems unlikely that the loss of this information mattered very much because Johnson’s advisers and staff passed the messages from him on their own WhatsApp accounts to the inquiry, so it was entirely possible to question him on issues of his government’s competence that were raised by those people during the period under discussion.

Here’s what he had to say:

Questions raised were whether there was an abusive/misogynistic atmosphere, how well the government performed, what the government’s members thought of each other and what they thought of the decisions that were taken.

The impression received by the inquiry so far, it seems, was one of “incompetence and disarray”.

Johnson tried to defend himself and the government, but you can judge for yourself how well he succeeded.

He said there was a distinction between the language used in the messages and the performance of the government, claiming that he “got an awful lot done”.

He dismissed concerns that were raised about the toxicity of his operation, saying prime ministers are constantly being lobbied to sack other members of the government, and opinions expressed by his top civil servants were part of the “day in, day out” running of a country.

He is continuing to give evidence so more will follow.


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Book a vacation and buy your popcorn: Boris Johnson faces the Covid inquiry next week

Boris Johnson: and the welcome return of the image that revealed what was going on throughout the Covid crisis. Or did it?

It’s the one we’ve all been waiting for!

Boris Johnson will go before the Covid-19 inquiry next week. What will he be asked?

And how will he respond?

Mr Johnson will face difficult questions, including over claims he said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose another lockdown.

The former PM will also be questioned about bombshell diary entries written by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, who said he was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going”.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

Rishi Sunak – Johnson’s Chancellor – will face his own set of questions the following week.

He will face his own tricky questions, including over evidence heard by the Inquiry that suggested he believed ministers should “just let people die and that’s okay” during the pandemic.

We all lived through the monstrous mass death over which Johnson and Sunak presided.

We should all have a chance to see how they defend themselves.

Source: Date set for Boris Johnson’s Covid Inquiry reckoning as he faces grilling under oath – Mirror Online


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

How could Johnson have become Prime Minister? | Mainly Macro

The Johnson ministry in a nutshell: and he was helped all the way by a right-wing press. Were he and they suppressing dissenting voices on the social media?

Boris Johnson is unhappy.

Apparently he thinks the Covid Inquiry has turned into a witch-hunt against him, because it is demonstrating that – as Professor Simon Wren-Lewis states in his latest Mainly Macro column – he was “hopeless and harmful” and “the combination of refusing to delegate and being completely indecisive was a disaster”.

Prof Wren-Lewis goes on to ask the relevant question, which is: how was Johnson allowed to get into a position where he could do so much harm?

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

His answer is that the right-wing press put him there:

Johnson’s premiership was the point at which the right wing press gained maximum influence. They knew Johnson would give them that, which is the main reason they boosted his career for so long. Prime Minister Johnson was in good part the result of a few press barons having immense power with little responsibility. The same press that was critical in giving us Brexit was also critical in giving us such a hopeless Prime Minister, and it was their influence that helped delay lockdowns leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

In any assessment of how our political system could have allowed someone like Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister, the role of the right wing press should play a prominent part.

That arm of the media did indeed have immense power to put Johnson in his place. While I disagree with him about the drawbacks of Jeremy Corbyn’s period as Labour leader (we now know the anti-Semitism “crisis” was manufactured by bad-faith actors, purely to keep transformative change for the better out of the corridors of power), Prof Wren-Lewis is right that the incessant concentration on Corbyn, coupled with flag-waving, tub-thumping trumpeting of Brexit (which has proved worse than useless in practice) put Johnson in charge during the Covid crisis:

[Corbyn] was preferable to Johnson… for two clear reasons. The first is that some form of hard Brexit was inevitable under a Johnson administration, but far from inevitable under a government led by Corbyn. The second was that there is no way Corbyn would have ever suggested that Covid was nature’s way of dealing with old people. Tens of thousands less people would have died if he had been PM. Now perhaps Corbyn would have done worse things than Johnson, outweighing the economic costs of hard Brexit and tens of thousands of UK lives lost to Covid indecision, but I have yet to hear any suggestions of what that might be that are at all convincing.

In months before the election the media … spent plenty of time discussing Corbyn’s mistakes, particularly over the issue of antisemitism, but much less time talking about Johnson’s record, racist comments and past failures. If there were extensive discussions about how illegally proroguing parliament signalled an authoritarian style and a threat to parliamentary sovereignty I missed it. I also missed the constant questioning of whether you could trust someone who in the past had made stories up and had lost two jobs through lying.

The analysis Prof Wren-Lewis was missing was available – on the left-wing, social media. This Site published multiple articles on the subject.

Who read them?

All right, put your hands down; you were in a minority then and there are fewer of you now.

The reason there are fewer of you reading This Site now is the purpose of this article.

Prof Wren-Lewis states that the right-wing press has grown to be hugely influential. It is possible that this influence has extended to a point where it is able to suppress opposing voices, by influencing the platforms through which we reach our audience.

And it is possible that the Tory government that won a landslide victory with the help of these press barons has been helping out.

That would be political interference with free speech and free discourse, which is, at the very least, a violation of our human rights.

It makes sense, doesn’t it?

If a right-wing regime, together with its helpers in the right-wing media, wanted to install a complete liability as a national leader, it would do all it could to stifle voices of reason, wouldn’t it?

I have a Freedom Of Information request lodged with the government at the moment, on this very subject.

What do you think the response will be?

Source: mainly macro: How could Johnson have become Prime Minister?


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Covid inquiry: are ex-officials using evidence to score points against former bosses?

Misogyny claim: Helen MacNamara.

The Covid-19 Inquiry seems to have degenerated into a slanging match between Tory ministers, together with their cronies, and civil servants – which is not to say that any of the information is untrue.

Latest to enter the fray was Helen MacNamara, former Deputy Cabinet Secretary – and therefore the UK’s second most senior official at the time of the pandemic – with a flurry of accusations about sexism among Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and their Tory buddies.

It is all-too-believable in a post-Partygate world.

The list of claims assembled in the BBC’s report is lengthy. Let’s have a look:

Helen MacNamara told the Covid inquiry a “toxic” environment affected decision-making during the crisis.

She said that female experts were ignored, and women were “looked over”.

She also accused Boris Johnson of failing to tackle “misogynistic language” used by Dominic Cummings.

Ms MacNamara described a “macho, confident” environment within government when Covid struck in early 2020, with an “unbelievably bullish” approach about the UK’s ability to respond.

She expressed concern that the lack of a “female perspective” on the crisis in a number of policy areas.

This included a “lack of thought” about childcare during school closures, the impact of restrictions on victims of domestic violence, and a lack of guidance for pregnant women.

She also wrote that a “disproportionate amount of attention” was given to the impact of lockdown on “male pursuits”, citing football, hunting, shooting and fishing.

Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!

In an email sent to female staffers from April 2020, read out at the inquiry, she described the “egotistical and macho” culture as “demoralising to work in,” noting that women had only spoken for “10-15 minutes” in over five hours of meetings earlier that month.

She told the inquiry she had found the lack of female participation “striking”, with women turning their screens off during Zoom calls or “sitting in the back row” during meetings.

The Royal College of Nursing’s chief nurse, Nicola Ranger, said senior men in government “relied on nursing staff to deliver care to the highest standard, whilst failing to meet basic professional standards themselves”.

“As a 90% female profession, nursing staff will find today’s reminders painful,” Ms Ranger said. “These cavalier and misogynistic attitudes left nursing staff, especially women, at even greater risk and with deadly consequences.”

In other evidence heard by the inquiry:

  • Ms MacNamara said she would struggle to “pick one day” when Covid regulations were followed properly inside Downing Street
  • She also accused Downing Street of “lying” about parties, in its initial response to the Partygate scandal
  • She criticised an over-reliance on following advice from scientists, calling it a “cop out” from ministers and unfair on the scientific experts
  • In one email, she said there was a tendency to treat the advice of scientists like “the word of God”
  • She also said former health secretary Matt Hancock displayed “nuclear levels” of overconfidence, but had a habit of making assurances that turned out not to be true
  • She described a “jarring” episode where he imitated a cricket batsman, before saying “they bowl them at me, I knock them away”
  • She also said she had failed to retrieve messages on her work phone after leaving the Civil Service, but the Cabinet Office had deleted them

Elsewhere in her evidence, she described a “lack of care” for government staff, which she added proved “damaging in all sorts of ways”.

She recalled that it was over seven months into the pandemic before a hand sanitizing station was placed near a link bridge between the Cabinet Office and No 10 with a Pin pad regularly used by officials.

She also said she repeatedly requested but failed to receive “psychological support” for civil servants working on on the Covid response, adding “I don’t really understand why we couldn’t do that”.

She told the inquiry the government’s response in a number of areas showed an “absence of humanity,” adding in her testimony that the reaction to the Covid situation in prisons “felt very cold”.

She’s another one who claimed to have had problems with messages on her phone – but at least her excuse was different. She said she had “extraordinary” problems providing evidence to the inquiry because after she left, the Cabinet Office wiped her work phone.

Again (This Site has covered this issue several times now), this seems unlikely if they were WhatsApps because the messages are kept in a “cloud” – separate from individual phones, meaning they should be retrievable.

The report added:

Matt Fowler, co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said the evidence coming from the inquiry was “worse” than feared.

He said the evidence showed “special advisors from privileged backgrounds” were not interested in “how their decisions would impact the disabled, low-income households, at-risk children and others who weren’t like them”.

We are building up a picture of a Westminster government that was using Covid-19 as a means to achieve the aims of its individual members, without the slightest interest in the well-being of the UK as a whole.

This fits with what reporters like This Site were saying at the time, when we were commenting on failures to provide for the most vulnerable in society, coinciding with the provision of huge amounts of money to Conservative friends and donors in Covid-related business contracts that were granted using the illegal “fast-track” process.

Here‘s a prime example: Cummings has claimed that Johnson thought people could kill Covid-19 by using a “special hair dryer” up their nose:

He said Mr Johnson shared the Youtube clip – since deleted – in a WhatsApp group with Sir Chris, England’s chief medical officer (CMO), and Sir Patrick, then the government’s chief scientific adviser (CSA).

He then “asked the CSA and CMO what they thought”, he added. The statement does not detail what response – if any – was given by the advisers.

Cummings also said Johnson asked him to find a “dead cat” (a story that would distract the news media) to draw attention away from Covid-19 in late 2020:

In the summer of that year, he wrote, Mr Johnson “wanted to declare Covid ‘over’ even though this would obviously backfire”.

“At one point in autumn he told me to ‘put your campaign head back on and figure out how we dead-cat Covid, I’m sick of Covid, I want it off the front pages,'” Mr Cummings added.

“I said that no campaign could ‘dead-cat Covid’ and I would not spend my time on such a project,” he added.

Others, like the devolved government in Wales, were doing the right thing but were attacked for it by the Westminster elite, the inquiry heard.

Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s former head of communications, praised Mark Drakeford’s Labour-run Welsh government for correctly imposing a three-week “firebreak” lockdown in October 2020:

During it people were told to stay at home and pubs, restaurants, hotels and non-essential shops had to shut.

Gatherings, indoors and out, with those not in your household were also banned.

Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford called it a “short, sharp, shock to turn back the clock, slow down the virus and buy us more time”.

The Welsh lockdown, which would eventually be mirrored in England two weeks later, led to a clash with the UK Treasury.

Make a note of this because it concerns the current prime minister:

It saw then Chancellor Rishi Sunak decline to bring forward the new Job Support Scheme (JSS) to replace the furlough in time to top up Welsh wages, leaving many employees fearing redundancy.

In a letter to Mr Drakeford he rejected implementing JSS – which would have covered 67% of wages – a month sooner because of “limitations in HMRC delivery timescales”.

So Sunak had a tantrum and threw his toys out of his pram – and Welsh employees had to suffer for it.

In his witness statement to the inquiry, Mr Cain said a meeting in the Cabinet room in Westminster on 21 September 2020 heard “overwhelming expert opinion that if the (UK) government did not take action in the form of a circuit breaker, Covid would once again spread rampantly across the UK”.

“That would leave no other option than a longer more restrictive lockdown in the months ahead,” he said.

The statement then went on to say that “by late October Covid rates had continued to rise and were at risk of getting out of control.”

Eventually then Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown for England, which began on November 5, 2020 and lasted for a month.

It was chaos, wasn’t it?

With these idiots in charge, it’s a wonder we weren’t all dead by November 5, 2020.

Martin Kettle in The Guardian reckons the problem lay with the whole UK system of government, saying it needs to change.

But there’s a big problem.

The lunatics are still in charge, and are only likely to be replaced by another gang of lunatics at the next general election. How are we going to achieve change when our only electoral options are people who won’t implement it?


Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:

1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.

2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical

3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com

5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/

6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical

7) Feel free to comment!

And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook