Breaking News: Boris Johnson has selected a more comfortable place to hide than a refrigerator without leaving the country! There is a tough and tumultuous week ahead which, for the PM, routinely means time to take a hike and maintain an extremely low profile while dumping on Ministers to front the harsh media challenges for a couple of weeks. The PM is such a serial liar, focused as he always is on PR spin, it’s understandable that we might question whether he was exposed for a second time or even if his dramatic bout with Covid earlier this year was just a stunt? The ‘Dom with a box’ stunt allows Johnson to offload all blame for the hostile and combative atmosphere in Downing Street and the disastrously shambolic policy rollercoaster onto the retched ‘Herd Nerd,’ who the public already detest. The much touted ‘reset’ is primarily about drawing a definitive line under ten months of catastrophic mistakes and frantic U-turns as if Johnson and his Tory Government are not at all responsible for the 70.000 excess deaths in the UK!
The Critic Article entitled, “Dominic Cummings’s 2020 vision,” They ask, “Why didn’t Dom do data?” They say that, “The departure of Dominic Cummings from Boris Johnson’s administration will, we’re told, provide an opportunity for a ‘reset’. Certainly there’s likely to be a change of tone, if only because it would be hard to find anyone else who is as determined to have a fight with absolutely everyone. Or at least tell us that, or have their friends tell us that.” This is supposed to signal a reassuring relief from the aggressive, confrontational politics to… the standard misogynistic, homophobic, vile racist, Boris Johnson that we can all learn to choke down because he is a bit of a clown. There are many who do not enjoy being on the receiving end of his not at all funny put downs that promote ‘othering’ and social division in this country. If he is so offended by his current girlfriend being called “Princess Nut Nut” why can’t he see the need to apologise for all of the many deeply offensive slurs he has committed to print in the past?
The Critic say that, “the government’s deepest problem will remain. Indeed, it predated both Johnson and Cummings’ arrival in Downing Street, though they are its parents. Brexit was marketed by Johnson and Cummings as a policy with no short-term economic harms. It’s a problem exposed whenever we ask the prime minister’s office for an estimate of the economic impact of the government’s proposed Brexit model. Trust me on this: economic modelling matters to governments. Because even if you choose not to add the numbers up, they don’t go away. Margaret Thatcher would have known this. She’d have employed homely, personal-to-national metaphors involving pocketbooks. Alfred Sherman would have found the requisite bit of Dickens – ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery’. These are traditional Tory themes.” I think that portraying the UK economy as comparable to personal finances was a vile Tory excuse for greedy, ideologically driven austerity!
Regarding Tory MPs the Critic report that, “Their underlying truths are really still there whenever a minister pops up talking about an ‘Australia-style’ Brexit deal, for example. The problem is not that the government isn’t telling us the truth. It’s that it’s not telling it to itself. The government can offer estimates of the economic benefit of its trade deal with Japan, for instance, but it has nothing to say about the likely impact of leaving the European single market. This is not because there is no one in the Treasury capable of performing such a calculation, or because there are no economic models for what happens when a country introduces barriers to trade. The only reason that the calculations haven’t been published can be that the government doesn’t want to know the answers. Whatever the virtues of Brexit as an idea, it was marketed by Johnson and Cummings as a policy with no short-term economic harms. Theresa May never felt able to contradict that idea, and Johnson certainly has no interest in doing so.”
According to the Critic, “Cummings of course set himself up as the enemy of self-deception. He had seen others indulge in it: Tories, Remainers, Brexiteers, sphinxes without riddles, the media, Bismarck’s enemies (I guess), classic third-rate suck-up-kick-down sycophants presiding over shambolic courts. Unlike fey, Oxbridge-educated OEs, such as David Cameron (riddleless sphinx) and Ed Llewellyn (c.t-r.s-u-k-d. sycophant), who didn’t even aspire to shamateurism, Cummings was the illusionless man. He was going to be different; he had read Moneyball. He was going to find out the hard truths about the British government and look them in the eye. Civil servants, like all functionaries in bureaucracies, know better than to believe such statements. All bosses say they want to be told hard truths, but clearly not all of them do. Nor, whatever they might tell themselves, or have their friends tell others, can all advisors, I mean, bosses, handle being told the truth by their subordinates.”
The Critic elaborate, “Sometimes the truth has to be escorted away from your presence at gunpoint, as Churchill so very nearly put it. Johnson’s government has revealed its preference not to hear some difficult things, so it is reasonable to assume it won’t want to hear other difficult things either. This is a government that would prefer to hear comfortable things than true things. This, to taste, Nelsonic blind eye, or wilful, frightened disinclination to look your triumphs square in the face, has been sustainable on Brexit because of Britain’s transition limbo. But customs forms are stubborn things. With our final departure from the EU now weeks away, the government finds itself building lorry parks in Kent for queues that ministers can’t quite bring themselves to admit will exist. Businesses are urged to prepare, but the language is of ‘opportunities’ and a ‘new start’. The ads are confusing because they can’t admit the reality, that moving things in and out of the country is about to get harder and more expensive.”
The Critic report that, “Of course, officials know the truth of their models. In this way, parts of government have come to resemble the Soviet Union: there is a reality that appears in public statements, and a reality around which people are working, and no one can mention that the two aren’t the same. Once upon a time, being clear-sighted about the world round you was a point of pride for Conservatives. And even for – they tell us, or have their friends tell us – people-who-aren’t-members-of-the-Conservative-Party too. Though these people who aren’t Conservatives do so very often always seem to end up working for the party. But again, we must return to self-deception and its foes. For realistic Tories, ‘Havel’s Greengrocer’ was a core parable, warning against the degradation of a political system that makes you lie and affect to not notice lies, and rubs your face in the fact that that’s just what you’re doing.”
The Critic say that, “Ministers may tell themselves that this refusal to face facts is strictly limited to one area. On other issues, they may say, they want to hear the unvarnished truth. But even if this were true, it’s a message that’s unlikely to have reached officials. The clear signal from the top is that this is a government that would, on the most vital of subjects, prefer to hear comfortable things than true things. Which leaves us with the great irony of Cummings’ time running Downing Street: a man who was an evangelist for the idea of finding the truth in data oversaw an operation that suppressed data, for fear it might reveal the truth.” Sadly as we careen towards the preordained disaster of crash-out there are few opposition voices shouting loudly enough and demanding the crucial data. Intimidation of those who dares to challenge Tory “Will of the People” propaganda has to be aggressively dismissed. Brexit is no longer the will of the people and accurate data re the consequences could stop the lemmings piling over the cliff edge!
In a Critic Article, written by Tory MP Steve Baker at a time when the PMs Chief Adviser’s transgressions were far more serious, and entitled “Boris: take back control, Steve Baker calls on Dominic Cummings to go,” the writing looked to be on the wall for this controversial Spad. But no, Boris Johnson bent over backwards to excuse his lawbreaking upsetting a huge sector of the British public. Baker describes, “Today’s newspapers are a disaster. Enormous political capital is being expended saving someone who has boasted of making decisions beyond his competence and who clearly broke at the very least the guidance which kept mums and dads at home, without childcare from their parents, and instead risked spreading the virus by travelling.” Unforgivable given the massive personal sacrifices of families all over the country, many had not been able to say goodbye to loved ones. Callous, mean and grotesquely insensitive to the collective pain on the population Cummings was universally hated for his exceptionalist cheating.
Baker wrote, “It is intolerable that Boris, Boris’s government and Boris’s programme should be harmed in this way. Three changes are immediately required. First, the Government needs competitive expert advice. It is obvious that if Oxford’s Professor Sunetra Gupta or Sweden’s Professor Johan Giesecke had determined the scientific advice of SAGE, measures to stop the virus would not have been so hard nor gone on so long. In a year, it seems likely we will look back and ask, not why we were slow going into lockdown, but why we were so slow coming out. Why was so much predictable economic carnage fomented? Why did official policies allow so many people with urgent non-COVID health problems to die without care? How could a Government so focused on our NHS have allowed waiting lists to increase by millions?” I believe it wasn’t so much the lockdown, but the huge misdirection of priorities that was at fault. Now, with a second national lockdown, another set of misdirected priorities has prevailed.
Baker seems to salute Gove’s distain for experts or at least cherry-pick those he finds credible in order to meet his preconceived ideas of what is right and the acceptable way forward; he totally slams well respected Professor Neil Ferguson. He writes, “We need to embrace the truth that experts fail too. Professor Roger Koppl has set out the perfectly reasonable explanations why experts get things wrong. We need to learn what Feynman taught, ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” He suggests to, “then establish competing teams so Prime Ministers and Cabinets can select the advice which does least harm and most good. Second, scandalous incompetence must be expunged from the implementation in software of scientific theories. Superb dissections of the junk code which implements Professor Neil Ferguson’s frequently-wrong model have been written. However brilliant and correct science may be, it is worse than useless – positively harmful to millions – if it is coded badly.”
We should remember that Ferguson was not a freak outlier, but one of a range of experts contributing to projections about a virus we knew very little about; erring on the side of caution is wise. In defence of his blasting Professor Ferguson out of the water Baker touts his own credentials. He boasts that he, “was a professional airworthiness then software engineer once upon a time: anywhere else – be it the RAF or investment banking – requires seriously good code for seriously important things. Government and academic science must now pass that threshold too. This is a lesson we have learned the hardest way possible. Government must insist in law on software engineering standards commensurate with the task of steering public policy imposed on millions of people by force of law. And no area of policy can be immune: both epidemiology and climate change must be supported by open, high quality software which engenders confidence not derision. Work must start immediately on defining those software standards.”
This next sentiment is really difficult to choke down coming from a filthy rich, blatantly self-serving Tory who in the majority of his decisions in Parliament does not put any ordinary, working poor, constituents first. Baker says, “Third, everyone in senior political office must make the right decisions, for the right reasons, in the right way and carry them to completion with the right techniques. We must have no more ‘hollow men’ leaning together with heads filled with straw, whispering together the same vapid tropes handed to them by a strongman to whom they have sworn fealty. Neither can we have in backroom power a dominant figure who regards accountability with contempt. One who venerates science beyond reason and whose response to every serious problem is, metaphorically, to drag someone into the public square and chop off their head. I refer, of course, to Dominic Cummings.”
With an inside take on the campaign Baker says of Dominic Cummings, “As Vote Leave geared up, I watched with admiration his actions there from a desk in their open plan office. To work for Dom, to obey, is to be respected, to be part of a brilliant, driven team.” This runs counter to my own strong belief in the advantages of collaborative brainstorming; I believe I gain far more from those who criticise my ideas than from those eager to reassure me. Baker says, “Dominic cultivates heartfelt and ferocious loyalty, as Vote Leave’s board found when they rightly tried to sack him for regarding accountability with disdain. And that, right there, is why I have always opposed Dominic being in Number 10. Not because he lacks talent: he is brilliant. Not because he is weak: his resolve is absolute. Not because he shrinks from wreaking great and terrible things: he stops just beyond the civilized limit. Indeed, Dominic Cummings taught me a great deal to apply in his absence, in the period of my life when I needed to be ruthless.”
However, even his admirers admit he is a wrecking ball with Baker saying, “Dominic Cummings must go before he does any more harm. But I always made myself accountable to more senior colleagues. As far as I am aware, among those who work with, rather than for him, only Michael Gove enjoys Dom’s respect. So it is hardly surprising when mums and dads were going without the childcare provided by their parents – perhaps while they were isolating for 7 and 14 days with COVID19 symptoms – that Dominic was suiting himself with a long drive, presumably with stops, to get help during his illness. After all, he said we should vote for the original Withdrawal Agreement without reading it, on the basis Michael Gove articulated: we could change it later. But now with him in power, we are putting in a modest border in the Irish Sea.” Hey a lose canon is a lose canon Steve, your genius wrecking ball is wrecking havoc with Covid strategy, democracy, Brexit and beyond; such is the deadly power of Dictators and their sycophants!
Baker Reveales: “We were told Dominic was not involved in Team Boris. We were told he would not be Chief of Staff. We were told he would go after we left the EU on 31 October 2019.” But Baker reports, “here he is: the man who failed to get us out of the EU on time but did enormous collateral damage along the way. Clinging on as Chief of Staff in a pantomime of his own making, burning Boris’s capital when it is most needed. Seeing to it that the media are sneered at and the police are attacked for doing their duty. To get his way. Enough is enough. I and others saved him once before when he was driving Vote Leave to implosion. Not today. Dominic Cummings must go before he does any more harm to the UK, the Government, the Prime Minister, our institutions or the Conservative Party. Time is up. It is time for Dom to resign so Boris can govern within the conventions and norms which will see us through. It is time to get competing expert advice, decent software and better decisions, end the lockdown and start a long, hard recovery.”
While I am certainly no fan of Conservative MP Steve Baker, the preceding article provides an interesting insight into what even the most radical members of the European Research Group (ERG), thought of Dominic Cummings; was this powerful cannon really considered to lose for the main armoury! Is Cummings truly gone for good or has he just faded from public view? Now a convenient scapegoat for Tories to publicly decry if he can slip into the shadows to continue his Machiavellian manoeuvres in dismantling our democracy: why not? We cannot relax our guard based on an all too public exit and tales of a defining spat that could all be just a deliberately distracting ruse. The Tories have been planning a no-deal crash-out Brexit all along; will the Biden Presidency rock the boat? We cannot count on it and must continue to demand greater transparency and an Investigation into the Covert 2019 Rigged Election. Even with Cummings gone, this Tory Government is rotten to the core and we desperately need to Get The Tories Out! DO NOT MOVE ON!