You'll hear the words "sorry", and "heartfelt apologies" without any real acceptance of his own failings, I suspect.
He will not prepare, because preparation is for ‘little’ people and it’s questioning by ‘grown-ups’ not client journalists who need to maintain contacts and access
Various people are reporting he has put a lot of time into preparing including undergoing mock questioning.
Given how narcissistic he is it does make sense since it will be his chance to try and repair his legacy.
HIs problem will remain in that he will be facing folk who are far better at this than him and will be able to pin him down to real answers - and they will have done their research as well I hope. Waffle answers are not going to cut it.
Not addressing this discrepancy is fundamentally dishonest.
I don't fundamentally disagree with that, but at the same time, It's not the central point of the inquiry. At best; you've uncovered the fact that there's a discrepancy between when now he says he started to change his mind about the doubling time, and when the official record says that the committee he was chair of says they did, isn't as important as the fact that regardless of the advice that Vallance (and others) gave, there was a reluctance to accept it, to deal with it and to plan a response to it by the folks who's job it was to do that.
It's like blaming Prof Linderman for the blitz because he was part of the reason for the delay in developing a response to the Germans use of radio direction guidance in WW2. He was advising Churchill certainly; but it's Churchill's job to take the decisions
It's undoubted that scientific advisors made mistakes during that period, and being human, may even be doing a bit of arse-covering for it now. Frequent contact with the reflexive liars of the political world can be ethically corrosive for those attempting to keep a foot in each camp, and politicians will tend to appoint those who they feel may be more pliable.
The inquiry for me is painting a picture of folk like Vallance trying to find a way to present a palatable version of the message to a resistant audience, the head of which thought that bluster and bullshit was a substitute for listening and learning.
The culture of no.10 at that point was dismissive of experts and hardwired to ignore the experience of other countries at the very moment when they should have been most receptive. Unfortunately the scientific advisors to some extent played along with that rather than flat-out challenged it.
Call me a cynical old sod, but tbh i dont see anything whatsoever coming from this.
Those are the top where the buck supposedly stops will be yeah yeah we made mistakes waffle waffle blah blah and the inquiry will say recommend lessons that must be learned and how next time they'll take note and do things differently.
Fraud committed, corrupt practices, culpability - No continuing action. Will the police or the law courts look to prosecute anyone,? no of course they wont.
Yeah, same as the Chilcot Inquiry, I think the final result came out just days before the Brexit vote, which obviously had an impact, but by the time they'd finished, most folks were pretty much "Yeah, whatevs"
Depends on the ToR but I suspect like most enquiries its intent is fact finding, and the report will be full of recommendations, but stop short of blaming. However, depending how the narrative is written it can very much point to wrongdoing (of eg: a criminal nature) which can subsequently prompt further action to be taken by others.
If people expect the enquiry to convict anyone, that won't happen - it's not in their power to.
Fraud committed, corrupt practices, culpability – No continuing action. Will the police or the law courts look to prosecute anyone,? no of course they wont.
There are suggestions that at least one high-profile fraud case is getting slowly unravelled by the police, although the sheer volume of fraud going on (perhaps at a lesser scale) means that most of it will just be ignored.
I don't see criminal-level culpability in anything else I've heard about the decision-making process, just a lot of incompetence and negligence. Closest so far to 'misconduct in public office' would be the recklessness and lack of scientific consultation prior to 'Eat Out to Help Out', but even that won't amount to anything. And there doesn't seem to be much shame or contrition in politics any more, however many faux apologies they dish out.
Call me a cynical old sod, but tbh i dont see anything whatsoever coming from this.
Those are the top where the buck supposedly stops will be yeah yeah we made mistakes waffle waffle blah blah and the inquiry will say recommend lessons that must be learned and how next time they’ll take note and do things differently.
Amen brother
MOne is being pursued for her fraud. One of the biggest frauds of the whole thing
The Liar in Chief is up today.
Ever the coward...
The man who is late for everything snook in through the back door, 3 hours early, at 7am this morning to avoid the bereaved families protesting outside and the press
Entirely in-character shithousery from the fly-tipped sofa. I doubt he'll be able to dodge everything else today as easily
https://twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1732317233244766347?s=20
Boris Johnson does even know what a factory reset is on a mobile phone. He's never heard of the concept.
Lying ****.
It's pointless him being there today given how predictable his answers have been so far. Utter sc#mbag.
And yet,he will walk away with a shrug of the shoulders,no shame,then move on to the next grift/gig,where he will hope for an upgrade from useless.
What an absolute (abandoned) shitehouse of a human.
Listening to the live coverage while working.
You can hear the cogs whirring as he tries to squirm his way out of actually answering the questions.
I hope we're not going to be disappointed with the KC skewering him today.
Of the SAGE minutes; Johnson admits that with hindsight, it might have been better to have read them more than once or twice "to hear the Sage conversation"
Coverage needs a 'Lie Counter' in the top left corner so we can keep track.
Where’s the live coverage pleas?
Coverage needs a ‘Lie Counter’ in the top left corner so we can keep track.
There is not a counter fast enough to keep up. The string of numbers would need a very wide screen monitor.
He's getting pretty tetchy already.
He still doesn't think he should be answerable to anybody, does he?
@Kryton57 - live feed on the BBC here....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-67634545
Poopscoop
Full Member
Boris Johnson does even know what a factory reset is on a mobile phone. He’s never heard of the concept.
Exactly this. On top that, WhatsApp messages are backed up to the cloud, and on top of *that*, you don’t have a WhatsApp conversation with yourself. At this point it’s about time that everyone who was in these groups surrenders their messages. They can’t all have forgotten the passcode.
The irony is that the Government would be quite happy to ban WhatsApp entirely due to the end-to-end encryption, but it seems incredibly convenient for making poor decisions and covering the evidence.
This needs to end. All internal communications should be permanently archived for situations just such as this, and allowing critical decision making to take place on third-party services is dubious from the beginning.
Simon Case being 'off sick' is actually a problem for Boris. It prevents him (and other top civil servants like Sedwill) from being conveniently chucked under the bus, which no doubt was the plan, because he'll now testify after Boris, and I'm sure he can bring the receipts to skewer him if necessary.
They could plot it using a log scale, which would be fitting for the inquiry.
What's the doubling time for his lie count? Because I suspect the more flustered he gets, the more exponential it will become.
The irony is that the Government would be quite happy to ban WhatsApp entirely due to the end-to-end encryption, but it seems incredibly convenient for making poor decisions and covering the evidence.This needs to end. All internal communications should be permanently archived for situations just such as this, and allowing critical decision making to take place on third-party services is dubious from the beginning.
It's a sackable offence at mine to be using personal mobiles/emails for any business decisions.
Not even allowed to keep stuff on the laptop drive, it has to be on the cloud server in case you leave/get run over by a bus etc.
Yet Government can make or break those rules almost with impunity.
Astonishing coincidence that they all seem to have lost/reset their mobiles at about the same time. And all these people who have access to global finance, nuclear codes etc can all "forget" their PIN.
I've been quite puzzled by the whole Whatsapp thing. When I worked in security cleared environments, it was a serious offence to transact any business on a personal device or using public comms. Yet ministers have casually been using Gmail, Whatsapp, probably Hotmail/Outlook to run the country. Why was that even allowed?
Because it's a convenient, plausible, cop-out?
Because it’s a convenient, plausible, cop-out?
Well, obvs, it was a way to avoid scrutiny and accountability. Also, working in a secure environment is necessarily more difficult and things can take longer. But it's another demonstration that these charlatans do not even understand the rule of law or how our constitution works (was supposed to work).
It's also plausible to their electorate, the one's that don't care much for details, experts or following the rules when it doesn’t fit. Losing a password, losing a phone, ignoring a few scientists - it's what normal folk do, in their minds.
Why did he put so much into getting a job he clearly didn't want to do? What a vain lazy negligent arsehole. How long will it take the UK to recover from his time as PM? Of course there are families that will never really get over what happened to their loved ones while he avoided doing his job.
Well, obvs, it was a way to avoid scrutiny and accountability.
right up to the point where you give all your WhatsApp’s to a journalist 🙂
Why did he put so much into getting a job he clearly didn’t want to do
same reason as Trump. He wanted to be thought off as the person doing the job
Same with Sunak.
Sunak could be sitting on some paradise island somewhere never having to work again but he wants the power of the top job.
They're all vain shallow narcissistic morons.
Why did he put so much into getting a job he clearly didn’t want to do?
He did want the job.
Its just he wanted the perks of the job and to be in the history book and not the downsides of being responsible for a country.
same reason as Trump. He wanted to be thought off as the person doing the job
I am semi convinced by the argument that Trump didnt really want it. He was just using it as a PR opportunity.
Although now he has been defeated he wants it this time round to use it to get revenge.
He did want the job.
Absolutely he did. He was driven. He just didn't want to do the job once he had it.
> add in something about serial adultery here <
All this stuff about "not twigging" about the importance of Covid, while all the Cobra meetings were happening, and even we, a loose collection of ignorants on a forum with only bikes in common (a few notables excepted), could see the danger and the possible measures required. What a...
Why did he put so much into getting a job he clearly didn’t want to do?
Daddy issues - he's spent his entire life being groomed for glory, whilst also being drip fed approval through horrendous parenting. If your dad is beating it into you that one day you'll be prime minister and you're not a success if you don't make it then that will drive you. Especially if you're embedded into the system that provides the best route (Eton, Oxbridge, tory party). Having competence or ability doesn't come into it
He did want the job.
It's not a case of wanting or not wanting it, he just thought he was entitled to it. Cameron was the same. Both thought it was their birthright and they we're simply 'fulfilling their destiny' or some other bollocks they imprint in the overprivileged minds of these six-toed pony-*ers at Eton
I doubt either of them gave a second thought to what they'd do once they actually got into number ten, as their toxic legacies both prove.
And it doesn't matter anyway. They always fail upwards however much they * up. Like the Bullingdon Club they were both part of, they just waltz off and leave the little people to clean up the smoking wreckage they leave in their wake.
Just look where 'Lord' Dave is now. I'm sure Johnson will follow a similar trajectory. Would anyone bet against him ending up in the Lords? It's when not if.
regardless of the advice that Vallance (and others) gave, there was a reluctance to accept it, to deal with it and to plan a response to it by the folks who’s job it was to do that.
But this claim isn't supportable once you acknowledge that the scientific advice was strongly against taking stiff action. This advice (against suppression) was given very explicitly on the 13th, then on the 16 and 18th SAGE advised a measured ramping up of interventions (which happened immediately) and finally on the 23rd they had an "oh shit" moment, realised they had got it wrong, and the lockdown happened that night.
I know the govt did plenty else wrong and the inquiry is covering a lot of things, but one of the specific topics is the decision making around the initial stages of the pandemic, and you can hardly consider that without taking account of the scientific advice available at the time.
So we are November to March and all I’m getting is “maybe”, “I forgot”, “don’t know” and wasn’t at any Cobr meetings.
I assume he listened to his lawyers warning about being under oath and the risk of documents proving the opposite of any active defence.
I'm not sure Johnson did want the job, but he definitely wanted to be able to say her was a former Prime Minister and that he'd done the job though. So he was happy with the bit before it, being noisy in the back benches, writing columns and swanning around looking important, and he definitely wanted the bit afterwards with the book tours and after dinner speaking. But the job itself, less so.
The issue for him is that he could of perhaps got away with doing the job in a period when not much was going on. He would have made a lot of noise, threatened to change a few things and then headed back to America without having done much damage (or much good). But timing wasn't on his side, he ended up with Brexit and a pandemic, both of which needed skills to navigate that he clearly doesn't have.
