Boris Johnson’s spokesman says he "can’t confirm" whether the parts of Sue Gray’s report taken out because of the Metropolitan Police’s intervention, will ever be published.

Presumably those are the bits which are critical of the government so the version to be released will exonerate them and then by the time the Met release the results of their investigation, we won't care any more.

The report is published.

At first read, it's a hamstrung report, but Sue Gray appears to have done her best to not pull too many punches. In particular I quite liked this section:

Yes, the most damning parts would have been those that she passed to the Police.

This is the part that's left in.

Load of rubbish - all hospitals had to do was to convert operating theatres to IC units, how anyone can compare that to civil servants and politicians having to move their desk over a bit to the left, to make room for the drinks' fridge is beyond me, we should be supporting out brave first responders*. Pure political posturing!

*First responder classified as - first to pop the cork

Totally Sir Humphreyed there. Well done.

Carrot Flower Queen says it reminds her of NHS audit reports (which she wrote for a time) in that the language has to be so veiled as to be opaque and criticism so coded that an Enigma machine is required.

And excellently played by the Met in ensuring that chunks are kicked even further into that very long grass.

What a load of old bollocks.

Oh FFS!

Blackford is suspended for telling the truth about BlowJob lying to the House, as he has done repeatedly, but "I am a waste of space! Look on my emptiness, ye mighty, and despair!" Hoyle does nothing about BlowJob.

WTAF is Hoyle for? He already has his "K", so he doesn't need that pay off. Is he after a peerage? Or is one of BlowJob's backers slipping him a few choice envelopes?

And Evan Davies on PM played a recording of BlowJob flat out lying to the House about one of the parties in Downing Street and challenged Brandon "I am such a useful idiot" Lewis to say that BlowJob was misleading the House and comment on whether it was intentional or not.

Useful Idiot just went into Farage Mode, repeating "Will you let me finish what I'm saying?" over and over without actually saying anything else...

Mebbe those questions would have been better addressed to Vast Emptiness Hoyle for him to explain why he has repeatedly allowed BlowJob to get away with lying to the House?

An expertly crafted, precisely calibrated, fully collaborated whitewash.
What’s different this time, is that everyone knows it Now, not in ten years time.
A ******* embarrassment of a Government.

Paul Waugh tweeted
@paulwaugh
Extraordinary low blow at @Keir_Starmer from @BorisJohnson, giving Parliamentary credence to the false online smear about Starmer not prosecuting Jimmy Savile. It's just not true. And surely the PM knows it?

Why didn’t the Speaker ask Johnson to withdraw that outrageous slander immediately?

Also how does he get away with calling female opposition MPs 'She' or 'Her' and not 'Honourable Friend' like he is supposed to?

Ian Blackford tweets
@Ianblackford_MP
·
2h
This is what truth to power looks like at Westminster. A liar is allowed to keep his place- I am forced to leave for telling the truth. He misled the house, he must go. Tories must look themselves in the mirror and ask if they can allow this to go on much longer? Remove him now.

Zahawi and Truss have declared they have covid today. How many more of the Cabinet will also get it now?

Can you imagine this Cabinet with Covid brain-fog?

Interesting interview with Dorries on Sky news

https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1...7GPjVGtYBymVQg

She's swaying all over the place - literally not metaphorically.

I'm not saying she's drunk, but I have seen drunk people look more sober than that.

With Truss having attended a packed (and maskless, I'm reading) meeting between Johnson and his MPs. I wonder if she tested positive before or after that meeting?

What a colossal bunch of *****.

Real Covid or I'm not supporting that twat in front of the media tomorrow Covid?

I could hardly understand a word she was saying!

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE

Ah yes. I hadn't given her credit for being that clever. Jolly good plan.

that doesn't work for me.

Was it Paul Whitehouse exceedingly drunk? Or Stanley Unwin?

Yes, I put it in youtube tags and it isn't on there lol

Here's a link that works

https://twitter.com/TheFastShow1/sta...64588000854017

Well it looks like Sue Gray did her job and Tory MPs have just enough of a fig leaf to keep Boris Johnson in post. The British public have short enough memories that this will all be forgotten when they're distracted by the successes of Brexit, the next big Covid news or the extra bank holiday in June to mark the queen's 70th jubilee. :rolleyes:

Perhaps Central Office told her to do a bit of ducking and weaving, and she didn’t realise it was a metaphor.

Makes about as much sense as her normal stuff

Had she just been to a work event?

Or a neurological issue

Julian Smith (Tory MP for Skipton and Ripon, former Chief Whip and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) tweeted
@JulianSmithUK
The smear made against Keir Starmer relating to Jimmy Saville yesterday is wrong & cannot be defended. It should be withdrawn. False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust & can't just be accepted as part of the cut & thrust of parliamentary debate.

remember, the rules are: Lies are ok. Truthfully pointing out lies is not allowed
Existing protocol is unfit to deal with liars, it was drawn up in the days when telling a lie in Parliament was thought to be dishonorable.
The current speaker is very weak and is effectively shielding Johnson.

Dominic Raab tells Radio 4 Today that Boris slur against Starmer was ‘normal cut and thrust’ of Parliamentary debate.

Has it actually impacted his approval with the public though? Obviously political actors that want to remove him talk as if they are outraged on behalf of the public, but is that born out in polling?
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics...pproval-rating

Partygate broke in late November. I'm not sure I see much of a falling off a cliff in support. It's more like there has been a downward trend since April/May last year

73% seem to think he's doing a bad job up from 60-odd percent before "Partygate" happened. That's pretty damning IMO.

Realistically, given that around 10% of people seem to be perpetually undecided, I'm not sure how much lower it can go - there are always Tory loyalists.

That said, the British public seem to have pretty malleable opinions and we've got some extra bank holidays coming up, Covid will likely go into abeyance over the summer, foreign holidays will be back on the cards and I'm sure that there'll be some EU nonsense to drum up support for Boris "the best PM since Churchill" Johnson. :rolleyes:

You cannot be dishonourable when you have no honour.

That's just it, when those in the system have no honour it all falls down.

That's the kind of thinking that means you chose Cromwell over Charles II.

Do you have a graph that shows some kind of a bump when partygate broke? I see a downwards trend since April/May. Some demographics maybe show a bump there, but I don't find it very convincing. The fact that you can find a drop between October and December when he'd been declining since May doesn't tell you anything of significance happened in November.

He seems to have bottomed out at 46% support amongst Conservatives. Again, that's really off a decline that started in May.

My take, for what little it's worth is that all the lockdowns etc is him playing against type. Opening everything up comes more naturally to him and I'd expect it to help.

Unfortunately both the UK and US political systems have been founded on the assumption that people will tend to follow the rules and when they don't that there will be consequences. The problem is that this is mainly governed by precedent instead of there being specific rules - and punishments for breaking.

The likes of Boris Johnson (and Donald Trump) have discovered that so long as you don't believe yourself to be governed by the "rules" you can simply ignore them safe in the knowledge that there isn't the political will among your cowed political allies to enforce them.

Personally I'd rather live in a republic than even a constitutional monarchy and think that the amount of power and influence that the gentry have is obscene in a country that considers itself (or at least should consider itself) a modern democracy. The likes of Boris Johnson benefit from this residual feudal mentality in the UK IMO.

I was thinking last night, that it would be nice if we could sue Eton College out of existance for the damage they seem to have done to this country. Dreaming is free.

Have they? I'm not sure that this is true at all. I would say that the US system is more founded on the realisation that everything is political, even the law, hence their views on impeachment following the trial of Warren Hastings.

It's not a discovery. This has been known for hundreds of years. It has just been convenient to present it as otherwise.

The difference with Boris and Trump is they make far less of a pretence about it. There probably are leaders who would feel honour bound not to break the rules, Theresa May would perhaps be an example, but do such people make good Prime Ministers? I think many people would take Johnson over May any day of the week. I think that if one insists on politicians complying with middle class morality, then middle class morality gets baked into the political assumptions. You end up being governed by dry moral prudes like May and Starmer, or PR men like Blair.

I would say they benefit from the working class being repelled by middle class morality. Maybe living in a republic like the US would be better where politics isn't dominated by the rich.

BP (Before Pandemic) I was often driving through Eton in the morning and I always wondered how many future PMs, ministers, high court judges and the likes I was driving past. It is when you think about it absolutely disgusting that simply going to that one school assures "success" in later life for most of them.

The greatest achievement of Thatcherism was to convince the working class that they were middle class.