Written By:
mickysavage - Date published:
8:37 am, May 27th, 2021 - 20 comments
Categories: boris johnson, covid-19, leadership, uk politics, uncategorized -
Tags:
Look what happens when political advisers go rogue. Sometimes they start being truthful.
This is what is happening in England where former chief of staff Dominic Cummings is saying, in a very unspun way, what he thinks of Boris Johnson and his role as Prime Minister of the UK.
The quotable retorts are coming quick and fast. Like:
The end of the Guardian article contains this particularly chilling passage:
[Cummings] claimed to have told Johnson: “This whole situation is chaos; this building is chaos. You know perfectly well that I can get great teams together and manage them, but you are more frightened of me having the power to stop the chaos than you are of the chaos – and this is a completely unsustainable position to be in.”
He said that, in response, the prime minister had laughingly agreed, saying: “Chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.”
Ian Dunt has this particulary pointed description of Cummings’ evidence on twitter.
What a day. Four straight hours of of testimony from a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood challenging the record of a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood.
— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) May 26, 2021
It's like Aesop's Fables for cunts.
— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) May 26, 2021
Meanwhile the latest Politico poll of polls has the Conservatives on 43% and Labour on 32%. Although in Scotland the SNP recently almost achieved something unprecedented, an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament. Things are very strange in the UK.
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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Boris Johnson has weathered greater storms than this and come out smiling and infact more entrenched in power than before. His popularity through vaccination and re-opening will not be dented by this poisonous court fool.
Thankfully we will now never know whether New Zealand would have withstood such scrutiny.
My personal hope is that India's ultranationalist Modi gets taken down through this.
It would be neat if Xi Jinping got a scorching as well.
Boris seems to benefitting from an exceptional roll out of the vacinne. His popularity is in my view solely down to that.
Brits can drink at the pub with their mates again and can almost go and see their football team again. They are happy, and a happy public, in these covid times, flows through to an incumbent government being well supported.
They are happy in the present but when the situation gets closer to normal and people have time to reflect, I think Boris is going to tank big time. When the first year (and second and…) anniversaries of people who died comes around (especially the health care workers) then people are going to get very arsey.
Listening to Cummings it became obvious it took the entire British cabinet and their collective advisors months and months and months to come to same decision Jacinda Ardern arrived it in a matter of hours. The British are ruled by entitled and ambitious clowns.
The lockdown call from Ardern will go down in our history as a moment of truly heroic leadership.
Amen to that.
Well said.
edit
It's a bugger being proved you're right eventually, but having to wait till the mishap, whatever it is.
Can we move to a state where they form opinions about the right action before we commit to something. People who did some homework, or knew the man's past history, would know the likely outcome when the souffle met with a hard surface.
QFT
The real poetry will come when the self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood realises he cannot inflict damage on the other self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood, because he undermined truth-telling as a functional quality in political discourse.
The SNP 'almost' achieving an absolute majority was unprecedented ?
Well they did do it in 2011 with 69 of the 129 seats , so the BBC headline
'Nicola Sturgeon celebrates 'historic' SNP election win" is absurd when this time round they are a minority government.
The BBC is supposed to be the impartial one in a sea of partisan media, no wonder political spin is the highest form of government.
Thanks I was not aware of the 2011 result and took the headline at face value.
For those interested – Cummings putting the slipper in last week.
1/65
https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1394245014440529921
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1394245014440529921.html
A shameless exercise in blameshifting from where it really belongs (the ideology of the Tory Party) onto the personality of Boris Johnson. From what I saw, Cummings was vigorously pimping for Rishi Sunak while also throwing in some gratuitous insults about Jeremy Corbyn. This made it starkly clear what a bogus exercise in personalisation it all was – Cummings claiming that there was something wrong with a political system that threw up leaders like Johnson and Corbyn. In truth, although Johnson is an awful human being, the disatrous pandemic response is the responsibility of the Tory Party as a whole, but political choice in the UK is now limited by media consensus to what type of Tory government you can have.
There is a touch of a clown dissing the ringmaster in this unseemly distraction.
Con (+20)
I heard there was a bit about Boris skipping early Covid Sage meetings so he could write a paper about Shakespeare. How convenient, associate the high wordiness of Britain’s greatest ever export with Boris Johnson. He skips class to to do even more brainy stuff, the posh scallywag. And haven’t we all felt like an out of control shopping trolley from time to time, think Britain’s rump.
It’s Cummings, remember.
4-D chess, innit.
Boris is playing the Trump Card keeping in the headlines drowning out all others.
Andy Warhol" there is no such thing as bad publicity "throwing dead cats left right and centre the Trump play book.
And yet he won't be removed any time soon given he is incredibly popular and the Conservatives are doing well.
'Incredibly' sure enough.
Wasn't Cumming at one point called Boris's brain? He was also the man responsible for the "herd immunity" theory- but now he is claiming that he told Boris to lock down. Give me a break his run up the country showed he didn't believe in rules for all were meant for him. With that decision he proved he was unfit to advise so everything coming out his mouth can be assumed to be a self serving lie
Don't know how to put this, but concerned for CleenGreen, haven't seen him comment in a while. Always a tireless campaigner for rail…I'd like to think he is OK.
As far as I can tell, last time they commented on this site was 7 Dec 2019. They regularly commented over at TDB; last time was 24 Jan 2021, as far as can tell. If you want to know more, you’ll have to put your internet search skills to good use.