by
Les May
WHEN
the Tory party handed the keys of 10 Downing Street to Boris
Johnson his first
instinct was to avoid the scrutiny of Parliament by proroguing it.
This behaviour eventually found its way into the courts and Johnson
was judged to have been a very naughty boy.
When
the story emerged that an unelected ‘special
adviser’ had
driven someone suffering from Covid19
some 400km to another part of the country, when such actions were
expressly forbidden by a law passed by his own government, Johnson’s
first instinct was to behave in a way that would
make it very difficult for any police force to investigate this
matter, determine
whether it was ‘reasonable
travel’ and if
necessary issue fines to both the driver and his passenger.
It is not for Johnson
to decide whether Dominic
Cummings’
actions fell within the
definition of ‘reasonable
travel’.
My
understanding is that the Daily
Mirror and the
Guardian
newspapers had approached Downing Street for comment before
the story was published. The
pair of them had plenty of time to ‘get
their stories straight’.
First
Johnson sought
to exonerate Cummings
by standing in front of the television cameras and saying that he
‘did not mark him
down’.*
Meanwhile Cummings was given to opportunity to get into ‘post facto rationalisation’ mode and prepare a long statement which he was then allowed to present to the assembled media over a 70 minute period in the Rose Garden of Number 10 Downing Street. Take your pick of the excuses he gave for moving his Covid19 infected wife across the country; he was just being a good husband and father, he and his infected wife were likely to be ‘harassed’ if they quarantined themselves at their home address, it was all a ‘media plot’ anyhow.
Meanwhile Cummings was given to opportunity to get into ‘post facto rationalisation’ mode and prepare a long statement which he was then allowed to present to the assembled media over a 70 minute period in the Rose Garden of Number 10 Downing Street. Take your pick of the excuses he gave for moving his Covid19 infected wife across the country; he was just being a good husband and father, he and his infected wife were likely to be ‘harassed’ if they quarantined themselves at their home address, it was all a ‘media plot’ anyhow.
What
we are seeing here is Johnson using his power to subtly influence
how the law operates. It will take a very strong minded senior
police officer to insist
on asking
Dominic Cummings some pointed questions. Fortunately
they still exist. Johnson
is not alone in this endeavour,
Michael Gove
tried to tell us that
at the time the
law was different from what the rest of us understood it to be.
The
media have decided to concentrate on the ‘human
story’ side of
all this with accounts of spouses and children unable to be beside
the bedside of a
relative who died. If
the political parties take this line Johnson’s subtle abuse of
power will go unnoticed and unchecked. Johnson
and Cummings are well matched. Spot the video clip where Cummings is
using his thick black notebook to waft
away the gaggle of
reporters who are trying to ask him questions. It
rather reminded me of Hastings
Banda and his fly
whisk.
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Posts
2 comments:
Ut has been quite a revelation how citizens of this country have relished the opportunity to become informers and enforcers of a draconian law.
Perhaps Cummings, Ferguson et al don't really believe in what they promote.
"If the political parties take this line Johnson’s subtle abuse of power will go unnoticed and unchecked."
The political parties have already failed by voting through, on a nod and a wink, draconian piowers restricting free movement. Unchecked and the future ramifucations almost unnoticed.
There was no opposition or dissent to the wisdom of the government's chosen medical advisors (Imperial College) despite there being many other 'experts' that disagreed.
A do nothing and there could be 500,000 deaths warning frightened a weak Parliament into legislating us into a semi-police state. The virus will fade. The police state will merely be put on standby.
We reap what we sow.
Perhaps the writer of the above comment can be persuaded to explain what he would have done in the circumstances. It may or may not be true that the government relied upon figures given by Neil Ferguson, but it is certainly the case that anyone could draw their own conclusions from information freely available on the WWW as to the likely number of deaths which would result if a ‘herd immunity’ strategy was adopted which would have been the case if no attempt had been made to check the progress of the virus. I explained how I arrived at a figure of potentially 360,000 deaths in a piece I wrote for NV on 14 March which was two days before Report 9 from the Imperial College modelling team. Anyone was free to challenge my crude methodology if they disagreed with it. ‘Back of an envelope’ calculations like this are never going to be exact, but they are going to be of the right order of magnitude, and MPs are perfectly capable of doing this for themselves. Perhaps some of them did. The Imperial College report is still available. It runs to some 20 pages, the assumptions used in the modelling process are made clear and it is anything but ‘sensational’. It will be seen that for some of the measures that could be adopted to reduce the number of infections it was assumed that only 50-75% of the public would comply. Perhaps the writer will read it and then tell us how he would have acted had he been an MP.
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