.
is trashing public confidence and doing lasting damage to public health messaging by undermining trust in the rules. With every public utterance they dig the hole deeper and deeper. The situation is intolerable- the PM must sack Cummings and he must do it now.
is trashing public confidence and doing lasting damage to public health messaging by undermining trust in the rules. With every public utterance they dig the hole deeper and deeper. The situation is intolerable- the PM must sack Cummings and he must do it now.
He has said lots of other stuff including "I'm afraid this sums it up. One rule for them and another for the rest of us".
The same Ian Blackford tweeted this on 26 March, 2 days after the lockdown started:
London to Skye is over 600 miles. It is assumed he took at least one flight and a ferry journey. Some punters on twitter are saying he had covid symptoms but I don't know where they get that from. But it seems clear his journey had even less justification than that of Dominic Cummings. And Skye has subsequently proved a covid hotspot with a large number of care home deaths.
This has been all over twitter for many hours now but Blackford hasn't responded and, for some reason, the mainstream media is not (yet) running the story.
Lots of people (who mainly look like Tory supporters) have asked Blackford directly on twitter to respond. I saw a suggestion that he just blocks each of them to stop them putting more on his twitter feed.
Now as it happens I am in the minority of people who think Cummings's journey was possibly justified. I wouldn't have wanted to leave my children when young with unfamiliar child minders. It's easy to say he must have had options but nobody knows that. We had relatives we would not have considered it suitable to leave our children with when they were small. I have seen a suggestion that Cumming's son is autistic. I don't know if it's true, but it would seem material. For what it's worth, on what I've heard, I probably would have done the same as him (not sure about the eyesight test drive, though it is logical). However the explanation doesn't really pass what at work we used to call the 'red face' test. Clearly most people think it broke the lockdown rules and/or guidance (whether or not it actually did) and the episode is doing enormous political damage to the government. 71% of people think he should go. (Actually I wondered if that meant he had become more popular....).
Incidentally in Wales it would be clear that he had broken the guidance to "stay local".
Of course, any way you look at it, the government's guidance will now be undermined. Though I have yet to see any of the many points on the lines of "we've sacrificed this or that" which are remotely comparable. No, it's not a justification for going to the beach. Or to see your relatives, which he didn't do. Someone who said they had been scrubbing carrots and decontaminating packaging asked "for what when he was spreading the disease?" But as far as we know he remained isolated with his immediate family and they were presumably scrubbing carrots for their own safety. Yes some NHS and care workers have lived apart from family because of the risk. They made their own assessment of what was best in their situation. As did Cummings, whether you think it was a good or reasonable assessment or not.
Whether or not Cummings goes for me this has revealed three things.
1. Johnson seems desperate to keep him at almost any cost. I can't help linking it to something I saw reported a week or two ago. The PM, going through the plan for the next stage of the covid battle, turned to Sir Mark Sedwill the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. "Is it your job to implement this?" Sedwill replied "no prime minister, it's yours". Most PMs feel the civil service blocks them as much as assists them but this seemed to me to be pure "Yes, Minister" stuff. It's risible to me that the PM could be responsible for implementing almost anything. I'd have wanted to sack Sedwill on the spot, even if the appropriate answer perhaps should have been "why not set up a task force, prime minister?" (But that would have been too helpful). I can't help wondering if Johnson feels that Cummings is his only chance to get the civil service to do remotely what the government wants. It looks like he'll have to find another way.
2. Cummings has had an almost universally bad press over the years. "Career psychopath" was one famous comment from a "colleague". This episode has made him seem more human to me.
3. Blackford confirms hypocrisy knows no bounds in politics. Now he does happen to be perhaps the single current politician I love to hate the most (he's turned me from a confirmed unionist to an independence supporter for Scotland just to get him off my tv). But the media presumably don't want to dilute the attention from Cummings. If Cummings goes, Blackford will probably be next in the firing line, but it seems not before.
P.S. 27 May: I got this one wrong. Blackford was returning to his main home after Parliament stopped sitting. This was after the lockdown but presumably travelling back to your home was allowed - and nearly all MPs will have done it. Blackford just happened to have on of the longer journeys. I've tried to check the regulations but most explanations of them give the reasons you were allowed to leave home, not under what circumstances you can travel home. Still a bit odd though - "I travelled 600 miles because I was allowed, you did a 260 miles each way trip which wasn't" still sounds like trying to take political advantage. Anyway, I still don't like the man and I just wish he'd stay permanently on Skye.....
No comments:
Post a Comment