The Covid Inquiry.

I hate to say it but I think I might have to reaprise my view of Dominic Cummings. According to Lee Cains testimony (another bloody over-promoted journalist!), 'Dom' was the only one 'kicking the tyres'

In other words he was the only person asking the question about what the plan for a pandemic actually was. He described what he found in the cabinet office as 'terrifyingly shit'

Nobody knew who it was who was actually responsible for doing anything and nobody seemed to care. Its the same word that keeps on cropping up again and again and again when describing what was going on in number 10 under Johnson ...

Chaos!

How is it that these people are allowed to use Whatsapp etc for official business anyway?

All 'business' comms should be via their official secure email system and an official secure messaging system.

They are not being held to anywhere near the level of scrutiny they should be.

I only saw this because there’s a clip doing the rounds on Twitter now of him in the interrogation phase of Celebrity SAS being called a weasel-faced ****.

Whether is his combo of unfortunately having the looks and personality of someone you'd want to punch, or the reality of what he did is true, thats the only thing that comes from his time in charge. Meanwhile he continues to pedal the "I did my best in challenging circumstances and acted on the Woman I fell in love with, and haven't profited from the pandemic" line which makes me feel sick. I haven't see that episode yet, but unfortunately he fared well through other aspects of the course which up until the episode before he has allowed him to verbalise his " resilient and can do" abilities.

Like all the others he goes down as a immoral liar in my book and it'd take a miracle for me to change my mind.

* me! I've heard it all now

Asked if the prime minister was up to the job, his answer was...

"I think it was the wrong crisis for this Prime Ministers skillset"

What *ing skillset would that be then?

According to Lee Cains

Yeah, don't forget that he is a creature of Cummings though. And if it was Cummings in charge, then we can lay at his feet: The woeful centralised  Track and Trace, constantly changing the strategy, moving very sick patients back into care homes, and the inconstancy of communications. 

Which just leaves, prioritising money over people, the terrible and unforgivable delay, and the lack of preparedness. 

What ****ing skillset would that be then?

Winning votes.

What ****ing skillset would that be then?

strong president skroob vibes

agree about Lee Cain about as untrustworthy as anyone could be!

loving that Cain & Cummings kept all those WhatsApps

https://twitter.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1719325865262096516?t=_sKgfwc1kFbYWSvduEuRYQ&s=19

https://twitter.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1719324182545113473?t=n5577zjzB7vV-cl0Z02ywQ&s=19

not to he left out....

https://twitter.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1719319774688375046?t=E9ILql04yUvFEdtO68F9aQ&s=19

"The appalling language was my own, but my opinions about the people they referred too were widely shared"

😂

Lee Cain tells the inquiry that because no one in the cabinet received free school meals, there was a policy "blind spot" about Marcus Rashford's campaign.
How sociopathic do you need to be to say "well, I didn't need this, so no one else should get it"?  I guess the answer is; you need to be a Tory cabinet minister to have a total lack of empathy.

If it wasn't so serious, the language in the live coverage on 5live would be really funny.

He's describing in great detail an utterly and completely dysfunctional government, totally incapable of making decisions

Who'd have thunk it?

Nice parting note from him to tell the country that everyone in the department referred to Boris Johnson as 'The Shopping Trolley'

Oh FFS, lost my reply due to a gateway error!

Not typing all that again.

Anyway, older Tory voters that will still love Johnson and still vote Tory after he was outright willing to have them buried 6 feet under...

Turkey's ... Christmas etc.

BBC live coverage of today's part of the enquiry has a warning for potential bad language, which is nice.

How is it that these people are allowed to use Whatsapp etc for official business anyway?

I do not think that they are supposed to. At that time I am not sure that E2E was a thing for WhatsApp, so would likely have been explicitly prohibited. But who is going to be telling that to Johnson or Cummings? If you tried, you'd be at best ignored or, more likely, removed from post. There's no one you can escalate the risk to and the only people that would likely find out anyway would be people that would not care or GAS about using it anyway. If you were a peon in the Civil Service and were caught doing the same thing, you'd be warned and/or fired.

Once again, one rule for them, one rule for everyone else.

But who is going to be telling that to Johnson or Cummings?

This is the whole issue in microcosm. Put simply, the reason many of us wouldn't vote for a populist government is due to the need for leadership when tough decisions need to be made; to elect anyone else is pretending that everything will be OK. History tells us otherwise.
Due to the mandate they felt Johnson had, they could do whatever they wanted to, unless it became apparent that it would lose them power. They'd no doubt justify it by arguing that using (& deleting) WhatsApp wouldn't be much of an issue in most previous governments, as the decisions would at least be fairly transparent. The worst case scenario of a global pandemic, war in Europe and resulting economic downturn didn't figure in their planning, because why would it? It didn't in their electorate either, which is where the real blame lies.
It's a slow motion car crash of a s***show.

I do not think that they are supposed to.

They're most absolutely not meant to be doing it, but they all do, for exactly the reasons you expect. So it can't be officially recorded.

If the 'disappearing message' had been available at the time, we wouldn't be seeing these now. They now all use that, so this is the first and last inquiry that will be seeing WhatsApp messages

Its becoming increasingly obvious why they all defended Cummings over the whole Barnard Castle thing. He was clearly the only one who had a ****ing clue what was going on and appears to have been essentially running the country at the time

In other words he was the only person asking the question about what the plan for a pandemic actually was.

Cummings' sole "achievement" during his period of power was to smash up all and every system or plan that ever existed for any purpose, without any clue as to what was going to take its place. The idea that he would ever have the chops to actually manage any large-scale issue...it's the very definition of chutzpah.

I keep thinking of the disabled bloke, living with his elderly dad, telling me in 2019 he was going to vote for Johnson because he was "a bit of a laugh".

I only hope he needed a bit of a laugh, more than he needed a functioning state.

Its becoming increasingly obvious why they all defended Cummings over the whole Barnard Castle thing. He was clearly the only one who had a ****ing clue what was going on and appears to have been essentially running the country at the time

They defended him for the reasons that Sky and the BBC have put warnings on the dialogue today. Cummings knows that they all know he thinks they're all **** and isn't afraid to say so. Now it doesn't matter, half of them aren't going to be MPs ever again, and the other half aren't ever going to be in cabinet ever again anyway. But at the time, Cummings knew enough to ruin their careers. That's why they defended him; naked self-interest.

Cummings’ sole “achievement” during his period of power was to smash up all and every system or plan that ever existed for any purpose

I'm not defending Cummings, but whats increasingly evident from all the testimonies is there was absolutely nothing remotely resembling any sytems or plans in place

Again and again, the same word keeps cropping up....

Chaos!

There was actually a plan at the outset, to "take it on the chin" with a bit of mitigation to flatten the pandemic wave. This was the official pandemic plan which had been in place for many years, based primarily on the assumption that there was no reasonable alternative. As indeed had been the case for previous pandemics.

However it was hopelessly inadequate for the situation that arose. It is certainly correct to say that they didn't manage to devise a new coherent plan sufficiently rapidly. Up to 23rd March, the SAGE scientists were backing the original plan.

whats increasingly evident from all the testimonies is there was absolutely nothing remotely resembling any sytems or plans in place

That was obvious right from the moment that Boris "won" the Leave vote. Him and Gove were standing there on the morning after the referendum with an "oh shit, what now?!" look on their faces. No plan, no expectation of ever winning, the whole thing was designed just to backstab Cameron a bit.

Come to power, still no idea, still winging it but this time with no-one to fall back on. And then the whole "WTAF do we do?!" thing got in the way of any pretence of governing the country and everything was Brexit Brexit Brexit.

At least when he was Mayor of London, he delegated everything to competent people while he got on with the "IT lessons" and coming up with big but shit ideas like Garden Bridges and Thames Estuary Airports.

As PM - not a clue and he specifically got rid of everyone who did have a clue and left it all in the hands of a psycho like Cummings who openly stated that he wants to break down "the system".

Indeed.

Its terrifying to think that a lunatic like Cummings was actually left running the country due to the bloke who was meant to be doing it running off and hiding (as per usual) when it went tits up.

What came after he walked was even worse... Carrie running the country

That was obvious right from the moment that Boris “won” the Leave vote. Him and Gove were standing there on the morning after the referendum with an “oh shit, what now?!” look on their faces. No plan, no expectation of ever winning, the whole thing was designed just to backstab Cameron a bit.<br /><br />

Yeah, the look on their faces was one of absolute horror, ashen faced and shitting a brick for what?…….for purely political posturing and pandering populist ideas to further their own political agenda. 

They were meant to lose... just... so that Boris could say 'oh well, never mind, I tried' then mount a leadership campaign off the back of that.

And we've all been paying the price for his vanity and entitlement ever since.

Up to 23rd March, the SAGE scientists were backing the original plan.

Indeed. I don't think they thought a lockdown would be possible and/or acceptable. They also thought the epidemic was growing at less than half the rate I had showed. I joined the scientists on SAGE/SPI-M two weeks after the lockdown started. I was also the only non-academic/non-civil servant to sit on the committee.

Never sent a single whatsApp during the whole three years. In fact I've only recently started using it for the cycling club newsgroup.

I don’t think they thought a lockdown would be possible and/or acceptable.

In fairness, the decision whether to lock down or not was a political decision, because, as you say, it's a matter of whether it's possible/acceptable. The likes of Whitty/Vallance should have only been there to say if was necessary, and let others tackle the logistics and difficulties, or reject their advice because it's too hard.

Trouble was, the politicians were also trying to find reasons to avoid taking tough, unpopular decisions until the rate of increase forced their hands.

Good news about the your WhatsApps, but what if they get wind of this place? 🙂

As for Cummings, he is a sociopath obsessed by the mechanisms of power, or achieving a certain result in the case of Brexit. The latter was all about how to bend the electorate to his preferred outcome. His method of reform was to tear down structures and rebuild them. The chaos was an essential stage of the process. I have no doubt he was horrified by what he found in Whitehall and the way that Boris 'ran' No.10. But he wasn't powerful enough to cope with both of them.

Johnson made a point of giving a speech in those early days where he said we would have an economic advantage by staying an "open economy" (the **** cheek of that) while other states closed things down to try and control the spread of disease. Yes, the speed of spread was a surprise, but before "enough was known" other countries were already planning and implementing the supposedly impossible/unacceptable.

Who are all of the people at the enquiry? The folk looking at screens etc.

Johnson made a point of giving a speech in those early days where he said we would have an economic advantage by staying an “open economy”

Rather ruined if all the people wandering around buying stuff and "keeping the economy going" then end up dead / in hospital...

Still, minor details.

Yes, the speed of spread was a surprise, but before “enough was known” other countries were already planning and implementing the supposedly impossible/unacceptable.

I distinctly remember the week or two before lockdown, when I and most people I knew were already working from home, the government allowed a Champions League match go ahead between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid.

The Spanish government had shut down all football games weeks earlier as Madrid was now the epicentre of the infection in Europe, yet thousands of Spanish fans could all fly to Liverpool and make a weekend of it.I couldn't believe they hadn't stopped it. I wonder how many infections came as a result of that?

Then you had the Cheltnham Festival...

I’m waiting to hear from our very own stw forum covid expert in this inquiry, no, not you TiRed - you’re the wrong sort of expert, I’m waiting for daveylad to be called in front of Hugo Keith KC to shock us all with his evidence that covid was a black ops operation to engender a new world order of 5G vaccine control.

Brought to you by the “Do your own research brigade”

Still, minor details.

Not to mention he wanged on about the benefit to trade (again, the **** cheek of it)... ignoring that if the countries you trade with introduce control measures... well...

but what if they get wind of this place?

Might learn something 😉 . I have only ever posted public domain information here, and that includes results of analysis I did using such information (that anyone skilled in the art could also do e.g., @thecaptain). I wasn't needed for the inquiry - I'd have been a very boring witness anyway! I archived all emails of course.

I distinctly remember the week or two before lockdown, when I and most people I knew were already working from home

Leeds train station at 08.15am a couple of days before the Stay at Home announcement was made by the Shopping Trolley. The Public had made up their minds already

I distinctly remember the week or two before lockdown, when I and most people I knew were already working from home

Yep we were all given instructions to WFH from about a week, maybe 10 days before the official lockdown was announced.

All credit to my workplace (which had a pretty good remote / flexible working policy anyway), they did a huge amount to support everyone.

There are a lot of news producers who are going to need a stiff drink tonight. I've not heard so many C bombs being dropped on TV since watching Ricky Gervais in Afterlife.

Listening on R5 but after every f-bomb they cut to a presenter apologising for the language and you miss 15 secs of the evidence, who gets upset about such language these days?

Incredibly, the SAGE scientists weee arguing right through the middle of March that we *shouldn’t* be taking action at that point, because they were worried about the risk of delaying the pandemic to the following autumn/winter when it would be a more serious problem (because, background pressure on NHS is always worse in winter).

It’s impressive how much they’ve managed to skate over their own errors in all this. I suppose I was naive to expect any reflection or self-examination from them.

I remember watching newsnight and it dawned on me just how lackadaisical the government were being, this was 2 weeks b4 they did lockdown

https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1238242156365721609

In work my Medical colleagues were getting a crash course in ICU for contagious diseases as theyd been called back from their PhDs, we did a fag packet calculation on deaths in the UK based on what appeared to be the herd immunity strategy at the time & none of us could believe it

I was still commuting into london we were raiding the institute for PPE for the medics to take because Northwick Park hospital had already seen a surge and had run out of scrubs, goggles, gloves and sanitising gel

My trains into & cycle through London were nuts, went from busier than anything to ghost town, last thing we did before they closed us was pack up our QPCR machines for the lighthouse labs (where they would sit idle for many months before any sort of testing programme was in place)

In case anyone doubts my account, the SAGE minutes from 13, 16, 18 March all back it up. Then there’s the SPI-M meeting on the 20th when they suddenly all went “oh shit” followed by the SAGE meeting on the 23rd when they all went “oh shit shit shit” and the rest is history.

I noted the 3 day doubling on the 10th March (it’s on my blog on that date, I believe I actually wrote it in the 9th). That’s two weeks before SAGE.

My trains into & cycle through London were nuts, went from busier than anything to ghost town

That photo up there, was taken by me as I was one of the last folks to go to our offices in Leeds, I volunteered as I lived alone, and I was just helping to co-ordinate the effort with IT to move everyone out, my train commute went from packed/standing room only to more or less having the thing to myself. Very eerie at the time.

nickc
Full Member

Leeds train station at 08.15am a couple of days before the Stay at Home announcement was made by the Shopping Trolley. The Public had made up their minds already

The fact that the government were havering about shutdown and lockdown while companies, sporting organisations, and punk rock bands were going "er yeah time to close" is still pretty staggering. When you're getting more decisive healthcare leadership from Frank Turner And The Sleeping Souls, and the Royal Bank of Scotland are more socially responsible than the government, you know you're in the bad timeline.

So what happened at SAGE? Was it a collective delusion, political influence in the background, or just a couple of loud voices?

Pretty much everyone else taking an active interest, scientist or otherwise, saw what was coming down the track when northern Italy went under. Some of us were talking about the possibility of a massive spread and significant mortality from a few days after the news broke from Wuhan and the range of possible R0 numbers was highly worrying.