>>89894 You mean with a hung parliament that was backed by the DUP which the gov then tried to stitch up with effectively redrawing the borders to keep them in the customs union?
Yeah! Stunning feat by Corbyn there to defeat the government on that. Well done to the lad...
Truly we couldn't be in more competent hands. Call me cynical, but what I take this to mean is that there's Capita call centre down the road from me being filled with "expert contact tracers" as we speak.
I'm not even going to be proven wrong am I. The government genuinely thinks it'll do the trick to get a company unqualified to process phone upgrades, to train unqualified 20-somethings to read a script on the phone, and call it contact tracing.
I was generously assuming they'd at least give them the standard-issue week long induction, but cross out all the references to Vodafone in the powerpoint hand-outs and scribble "coronavirus" over instead.
Once again reality exceeds my ability to be cynical about it.
>>89904 Might start hanging an Irish tri-colour out of my window, just to see what happens. My Irish accent's none to shabby so I could take this pretty far too.
Which reminds me: I enjoyed how our resident conservatives got bumsore over the word "simps". Right wing types really don't like their own shit flung back at them do they.
>>89903 Weren't they trying to start that back when he went into hospital? Imagine the disappointment after hearing that racket and thinking it was a Thursday.
>>89907 I told you to go back to 4chan because simp is a meme word from the chronic masturbator community.
Actually they find an antiquated meme knowledge to be quite endearing. Explaining to them how and why people thought YTMND was funny is usually all it takes.
>>89907 It's certainly entertaining on Twitter seeing all the aggravatingly patronising terms used by the chief verile young stud pill popping map fanatic, and that smug guy who became a kipper candidate and amusingly hastened the party's decline, thrown back at them.
Loathe as I am to cite Dad's Army, they don't like it up 'em!
It tickles me that until the most recent relaxation of the rules, most people (including the Prime Minister) were breaking the law by participating in Clap for Carers. "Standing on the street banging a pan" wasn't mentioned as a lawful excuse for leaving your home under the Coronavirus Regulations.
>>89915 Unless the rozzers decided you weren't, which I think in part was down to the terrible mismanagement from up top and a public messaging campaign that was effectively derailed by the Cabinet, the PM, his advisers and their dogs - the people who came up with and were supposed to be as unambiguous as possible in relaying guidelines. This Cummings lark has potentially thrown a somewhat stabilised disarray into a chaotic disarray, shown that there really has been no plan, and importantly, no universality and a fucking weird interpretation of exceptional circumstances. The PM simply doesn't get it.
>>89917 He's a working class kid who went to grammar school and done good. Look at the comments the last time the Mail tried to portray him as born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
I have a good friend who is a manual labourer on a good whack, has a big house, few rentals, votes tory, keeps up to date but not overly involved in the details. I use him as a great litmus test for a lot of voters and he said the same, he finds Keir Starmer annoying because he's posh trying not to be.
He didn't believe he wasn't working class.
How does this happen? Where are people getting this idea he's not from?
>>89919 He's well spoken and got a bit of a poncey name. I bet his TV is of an ordinary size, he's never had a trampoline or a hot tub in his garden and hasn't ever watched Gogglebox.
The meaning of class has changed so much in recent decades that we're all in a bit of a muddle.
Keir Starmer's dad was a toolmaker in a factory. Jess Phillips' mum was deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation. Keir Starmer went to university at the fag-end of the 70s, when working-class kids with ambition had to learn to disguise their roots to get on. Jess Phillips went to university in the early 00s, when middle-class kids play-acted as common people for credibility points.
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried"
If Boris is all that he's cracked up to be according to his biggest fans, why are they so bothered about whether or not Cummings gets the sack? Surely, if they loved Boris that much, whoever his advisor is should be completely immaterial, unless they are admitting that Boris is completely hopeless and can only operate with someone pulling his strings. With that in mind, what's the point of Boris?
By the same token, why do so many people believe that a) Cummings is really in charge, b) Boris is a bumbling idiot and c) Cummings should be sacked? Do we really want Bozza running things without adult supervision?
Everything Bozza has done so far has been pretty squarely populist. I don't even think he's what you'd call evil in the same way as a lot of his party, he's more naive, arrogant and egotistical. But not evil. He's running purely on some vague fantasy of being remembered as a "great" like Churchill. Unlike the Callmedave years, most of the harm Bojo's government will do will be thanks to his ministers and their back room deals, not the man himself.
In answer to your questions, it's pretty self evident that if Cummings isn't calling the shots, he's at very least integral to making sure anything actually gets done about the shots that are called. Without him Boris would be adrift in an utterly chaotic party that I doubt he'd be able to exert any real control over. It's both morally right that he should face some consequence, other public figures have resigned over less, and politically expedient for the party's enemies to have rid of him; but by this stage it's also causing what may well be permanent damage to their public image to keep on defending him.
Public opinion is fickle, and not at least performatively sending him off into a symbolic, temporary exile might be a grave mistake. After all, if he's not the puppetmaster, it won't harm them much to have him a phonecall away instead of present in person, right? And if he is the all important puppetmaster, it forces the electorate to confront the fact they elected a fraud. That they were not only conned, but thick enough to fall for it.
There are many facets to the situation but none of them look good for the Conservatives really, do they.
>Police: He broke the rules but on principle we're not taking it further.
>Government: There, see, the police said he didn't break the rules, everyone forget about this now, do as you're told.
Really I can't think how they could possibly have handle this situation worse. Pic unrelated but amusing nevertheless.
>>89935 a) someone has to be, which leads into b) because Boris isn't and c) Cummings is Alastair Campbell if he were a eugenicist but with a fraction of the charisma. He's single-handedly scuppered the entire public health message the government have been driving at, in doing so offend about 2/3 of the nation, and is providing the very distraction Boris is saying he doesn't want.
There surely has to be someone who's reasonably well-adjusted in the stable of pro-Brexit Tories who could do the job with less of the visible sociopathy. The job of advisor seems to attract wingnuts who otherwise wouldn't be able to stand a hustings session, let alone retain their deposit at a GE.
>>89937 >He's running purely on some vague fantasy of being remembered as a "great" like Churchill.
Can you imagine in seventy years time a future President of the United States keeping a bust of Boris Johnson in the White House.
>But no mere advisor should ever be thought indispensable and any prime minister so wholly dependent on a single advisor, no matter how brilliant he or she may be, is a weak one. If Boris Johnson cannot function without Cummings he is not qualified to be prime minister. The price of defending Cummings is admitting Johnson’s inadequacy.
Sage for being an asterisk and showing you how shite their paywall is.
Did what a dad would do for his kid. It's absolutely nothing to do with his mastermind of Brexit and helping the Conservatives achieve the largest majority since Thatcher. Or was that Corbyn. Gonna be an overblown media frenzy made up bullshit backlash somewhere. And absolutely nothing to do with Mark Sedwill.
Man who reported second Dominic Cummings trip admits he 'made that up'
A man who claimed to have seen Dominic Cummings in Durham for a second time in April has admitted that he made it up, according to reports.
Tim Matthews said he altered figures on the popular Strava running app to make it look like he had seen Mr Cummings in Durham on April 19, after the PM's aide had returned to London from his first trip.
His claim was reported in the Guardian earlier this week. But he told the Mail on Sunday: "I made that up afterwards, a few days ago in fact. I modified it for a little bit of comedy value. I undid it later, I’m sorry. A bit of comedy value even if it was really inappropriate."
