Cummings: Boris is unfit for the job

Written By: - 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:

  • Boris was obsessed with the media and making constant U-turns, “like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.
  • He was “unfit for the job”.
  • He held out from locking the country down in a response to Covid, despite the advice of many people inside Downing Street, and that overall, “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die”.
  • About the first lock down he said “I should have been the mayor of Jaws and kept the beaches open”.
  • In October, Johnson said he would see “bodies pile high” rather than order a third lock down.
  • Downing Street was described as “an out-of-control movie”.
  • About Secretary for Health Matt Hancock Cummings claims he ordered staff to “hold tests back so that I can hit my target”.  Hancock had set a target of 100,000 daily tests.  There were other Hancock lies, such as blaming Treasury for holding up funding for protective equipment and a real whopper that “everyone who needed treatment got the treatment they required”.
  • He claimed that Johnson said that Covid was no worse than swine flu and that herd immunity was followed as a policy until mid March when things started to get out of control.

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.

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.

20 comments on “Cummings: Boris is unfit for the job ”

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  1. Ad 1
    27 May 2021 at 9:20 am

    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.

    • Enough is Enough 1.1
      27 May 2021 at 11:08 am

      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.

      • mpledger 1.1.1
        28 May 2021 at 2:08 pm

        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.

    • Sanctuary 1.2
      27 May 2021 at 1:34 pm

      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.

    • gypsy 1.3
      27 May 2021 at 8:01 pm

      Well said.

  2. greywarshark 2
    27 May 2021 at 9:29 am

    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.

  3. Macro 3
    27 May 2021 at 9:31 am

    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.

  4. ghostwhowalksnz 4
    27 May 2021 at 9:43 am

    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.

    • mickysavage 4.1
      27 May 2021 at 5:49 pm

      Thanks I was not aware of the 2011 result and took the headline at face value.

  6. AB 6
    27 May 2021 at 12:27 pm

    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.

  7. gsays 7
    27 May 2021 at 1:58 pm

    There is a touch of a clown dissing the ringmaster in this unseemly distraction.

  8. Muttonbird 8
    27 May 2021 at 2:34 pm

    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.

  9. Tricledrown 9
    27 May 2021 at 3:24 pm

    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.

  10. Gosman 10
    28 May 2021 at 7:36 am

    And yet he won't be removed any time soon given he is incredibly popular and the Conservatives are doing well.

  11. Lucy 11
    28 May 2021 at 7:41 am

    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

  12. WILD KATIPO 12
    28 May 2021 at 11:09 am

    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.

    • Incognito 12.1
      28 May 2021 at 11:50 am

      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.