let the bodies of tory MPs election hopes pile high
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Frankly more needs to be said about Dominic Cummings' ties with Russia. Towards the end, for some reason, he was allowed to tour the UK's nuclear weapons facilities.
Why?
Not everything bad is the work of Russia.
Because there is a lot of evidence of Russian involvement in Brexit, elections and generally destabilising the UK, and I think it's possible that Dominic was their man on the inside. Hell, immediately after Boris became PM he seemed to not really be present in his role, leaving Cummings - an election campaign advisor, not an elected politician nor a civil servant - to fulfill many of his duties. Even without an affiliation to Russia, that's dodgy as fuck.
Is there? There's never been any substantial evidence of Russian interference. It's all just guesswork and "oh, well they might have done".
No one has presented any firm evidence to show that it has happened. And even experts on Russia say that the threat of Putin's interference is exaggerated.
There's plenty of substantial evidence. However, when it came to investigating it, we got a report that essentially said "We didn't find any evidence of Russian interference, because we didn't look."
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At the start of what is set to be a bruising week for the former prime minister, with former political aides and senior civil servants to give evidence on his government’s handling of the pandemic, the diary of a former private secretary revealed the damaging remarks made in March 2020.
The WhatsApp message was sent to Dominic Cummings, at the time Johnson’s chief adviser, by the cabinet secretary, who confided in the midst of an oscillating government response to the pandemic: “I am at the end of my tether.”
“He changes strategic direction every day (Monday we were all about fear of virus returning as per Europe, March etc – today we’re in ‘let it rip’ mode cos [sic] the UK is pathetic, needs a cold shower etc.
Reynolds, who was nicknamed “Party Marty” after it emerged he had invited more than 100 Downing Street staff to a “bring your own booze” event during the first lockdown, told the inquiry that he wished to “apologise unreservedly to all the families of all those who suffered during Covid for all the distress caused”.
Against the backdrop of a debate about the wearing of face coverings in schools during the pandemic, Case had written in a WhatsApp message that it had been recommended to Johnson that “permissive guidance” be created around masks because it was going to become a “drama”.
Records read out showed he met with the Russian newspaper proprietor and also telephoned him at the height of what counsel for the inquiry described as a 10-day “crisis” about a change of strategy in the run-up to the first lockdown.
The original article contains 1,021 words, the summary contains 269 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What exactly are we learning from this?
I thought the whole point of an inquiry was to "learn the lessons" of the pandemic. I'm not sure what "Johnson was useless and the cabinet were flailing around" is really teaching us.
We already knew all that, how is it helping us prepare for a potential future pandemic?