Cummings: Boris is unfit for the job

mickysavage
3 years ago
Categories: boris johnson, covid-19, leadership, uk politics, uncategorized

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.