What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

Not sure about the development of a safe Sars-CoV vaccination Forestal; I know that the equivalent mers vaccination trials were abandoned due to severe complications in the animal trialling stage. A thing named vaccine induced enhancement seemed to make vaccinated animals sicker than they would otherwise have been. Also (if I have it correct) there were problems with immune system disruption later down the line which caused the research to be abandoned fairly quickly. There is a New Scientist article titled "Threatwatch: Could a MERS Vaccination Make People Sicker" (sorry I can't link) that gives some details if you are interested. It should come up in a search pretty easily.

Also, the idea that the Covid vaccine is 'safe' is something of an oversimplification; the vaccine is safe within the limits of the testing that has been carried out to date - or more correctly safe to the extent that it has not produced any observable side-effects in sufficiently high number that have rendered it otherwise. The longer term safety aspects will only ever be known in the (well) longer term.

In vaccine development prior to the current Covid vaccines, the use of whole chain spike proteins in the developed vaccines was eschewed because of the risks they represented in eliciting unwanted side-effects/activity in the recipient cells. This proscription was dropped (to considerable consternation in many workers in the field) in order to expedite vaccination development in the face of the emergent virus. Ordinarily only the actual 'binding-domain' on the protein chain is used, but this takes time to isolate and time, in this case, was deemed to be of the essence.

Now it is entirely possible that this omitted stage could come back to haunt us in years to come; there is some evidence emerging that the protein chains are appearing inside the nuclear membrane and further, seem to be interfering with the coding of proteins that carry out essential DNA repair/maintenance within the cell (it is estimated that up to 70,000 such repairs are carried out in each cell, every day, as replicating DNA strands break or are otherwise damaged). The ongoing repair of DNA is essential for the prevention of cancer development in the healthy individual and is essential for the maintenance of a healthy system; anything that interferes with it is not to be taken lightly. The effects of such interference would not be seen in trials that are carried out over the shorter periods in which the Covid vaccines were tested, as compared to those required by earlier vaccine testing protocols - protocols jettisoned in our search for a vaccine that could be mobilised in short order.

In interview Diagnostic Pathologist Dr Clair Craig was asked why, in the face of the known risks of Covid, ten percent of NHS staff (who should presumably know better) would decline to take up the proffered vaccine. Her reply was succinct.

"That is exactly the question we should be asking," she said. "Why would these people, who we would presume to know, be refusing the vaccination."

(NB. Most of what I have posted above is scraped out of a YouTube vid i saw some months ago. The guy presenting it was (iirc) posting from Denmark and on the face of it seemed to know what he was talking about. In fairness, I believe he was talking specifically about work that had been done on the Pfizer vaccine, but included enough technical detail and referencing of the scource material (the academic papers and journals etc) such that his presentation had the ring of truth about it. I'm neither a cell biologist nor an immunologist, but do have sufficient of a science background to (probably) be able to sort the wheat from the chaff in such postings. Maybe what he was saying was just anti-vaxxer stuff of a more sophisticated level - but I don't think so. Certainly, it was way above the swivel eyed loon stuff that is the normal fare presented in such postings (chip injection world domination stuff), and sufficiently convincing enough to provide food for thought.) I hope he was wrong (not fair actually, because he was only presenting information, not drawing larger conclusions from it) - I've had three of the damn things - but only time will tell.)


But looking at this thing from a different angle, we live in a world of what six or seven billion people and into it came the Covid-19 virus. If the virus had only had the potential to kill a few thousand people, tragic though it would been for those lost, the world response we have witnessed (with all of its collateral damage) would have been entirely disproportionate. If however it could have killed four-fifths of the world population, then the response would have been too minimal. Somewhere in between these extremes lies the real world situation and the trick was always going to be getting the response proportional to the risk.

We've seen the response - and nobody knows what the cumulative effect of this will be - it will take decades to manifest. But the point is this. It is not the job of the WHO, or the Sage scientists to consider the broader consequences, economic or social, of the recommendations they give. They are focused on the public health aspects of the problem and how to minimise the impact of the virus/s on this. For them, the problem is the nail and the proverbial hammer the solution to fixing it. It is the job of Governments to consider the wider ramifications of what following their advice would result in, and strike the balance between what actions to take and which would be too costly. The question now is how well have they functioned in doing so.

Having been subjected to propoganda and behavioural nudges to bring us into a state of mind where we accept things that we otherwise might not have, it becomes almost impossible for us to trust our own judgement when we think to ourselves "This seems right to me," or "No, this seems to be going too far." How can we know, if our minds have been co-opted from the place where they otherwise might have settled, befuddled with manipulated information, what our untrammelled response would have been?

[peter]

On Monday I went to a local produce market to buy some steak from a butcher who's meat I particularly like. The market (a permanent covered area that adjoins the town's Waitrose supermarket) was singularly lacking in any produce that was not tinned, bottled or preserved, with very little fresh vegetables, no meat and no fish available.

Fair play - it was the Monday after New Year's Day - what did I expect. People were bound to have had the holiday period off and supplies had no doubt suffered a hiatus thereby.

I went into the Waitrose store instead. Shelves denuded of many products, freezers all but empty, the store carrying (I'd guess) about half the stock it would normally hold with the fresh and frozen sections showing the most depletion.

I thought about my own seven eleven shop; we'd run out of bread and milk on New Year's Eve and were not expecting another delivery until the following Tuesday. I'd put it down to managerial incompetence with the ordering - it's not uncommon to see managers underestimating the demand over holiday periods - but now I begin to wonder.

Food security is not a thing we have ever had to give any consideration to - not in my lifetime at least. I can remember no time in the last sixty years where either I or my parents ever had to worry that we might actually run out of food and not be able to immediately buy some more. But in a country of sixty five million people, by necessity we are never more than a few days of delivery away from severe food shortage. Firstly the fresh meat and vegetables etc, then the canned and preserved food would dissapear with alarming rapidity were the production and supply chains not to function continuously and efficiently behind the scenes. Throw in a bit of panic buying ala the petrol or toilet roll frenzy of recent months - and you have the makings of a serious - and I mean serious - problem on your hands. Huge numbers of people live on the food they buy on the day they eat it. Were the shelves to empty in hours - and they would (I work in retail and have seen the effect of a bit of bad ordering on a shop's stock levels, how rapidly it depletes due to the turnover) - then large numbers of people would be in serious trouble.

Some years ago I remember reading that the German government had advised its people that they should always keep a month's worth of preserved food and water in reserve, in case of a break in the supply chain. At the time I found it a little over the top, but not so much that I totally pooh-poohed the idea. It was just the Germans being over cautious. But as time has gone on, and I could see the disruption that particularly brexit was going to dump on our system, I gradually began to take the idea more seriously. As our separation from the EU happened and the gaps did indeed begin to appear on the shelves, I began to take the German advice more seriously. Slowly my wife and I began to put exta cans and dried food in our basket, until (and I haven't worked it out precisely) we've got about a month's food (taken sparingly) in store.

Come the pandemic and the strains on the system started showing, I became convinced that in a case such as this, it is better to be safe than sorry. I don't think that the country is going to be pitched into food insecurity - I think it's highly unlikely - but if it is (and given the absolute need for an uninterrupted supply and production chain, and the pressures that Covid and self-isolation and brexit related problems place on this, it is by no means impossible) then I think it best to be prepared. And at least I have a small buffer to cover ever so brief a time period, should it happen. How fragile or robust is the system - I can't tell you; that's reason enough in my mind to be cautious.

Besides which, to a degree, we in the West Country are lucky. We are close to the source of food production, I have a water source close to my house (a clean water river) and live in an area of relatively low population density. But does this give me any feeling of security or (God forbid) superiority over those less fortunately positioned - hell no! I don't want to test out our 'good fortune' by wishing disaster on the rest of the country. I want none of these things to happen, I want people to get back to work and do what they do to keep the whole thing afloat (another reason I want this ridiculous 'test and isolate' mandate thrown in the bin with all haste), I want the factories turning and the lorries running and the deliveries delivering.......

But meantimes the shelves look empty and I remember the advice of the Germans.

[peter]

Tis a strange world we'm livin' in! (That's a bit of the local dialect from the place I live in - not that I talk like this, but for some reason when thinking of this post's beginning, that was the way it popped into my head.)

The decision by a jury to return a not guilty verdict in the trial of the 'Colston four' (the four young activists who placed ropes around the statue of philanthropist and former slave trader Edward Colston and having toppled it from its plinth, proceeded to roll it into Bristol Harbor) is an odd one.

Whether I agree with what they did, or whether there should have been a statue to him erected in the first place is neither here nor there, I still find it strange that the four defendants should have been found not guilty of criminal damage. The reasons given by the jury (judge?) following the verdict were that the four had "acted to prevent a hate crime being committed against the city", and that as citizens of Bristol, they effectively owned the statue themselves, since it "belonged to the people of Bristol".

Now this is all well and good - I get it - but does it stack up, and what are the consequences of such a decision?

Remember in the process of Common Law, decisions made in one case can act as precedents that are followed (have to be followed?) in others. And surely the reasons given are spurious: surely the "hate crime" had already been committed long ago, when the statue had been erected? And we have to consider what other statues, buildings, works of art, and things that have become part of the fabric of our shared cultural heritage could be affected by this decision? What say, of the singing of John Newton's hymn Amazing Grace? Newton was a former ship's captain who made a living ferrying the poor individuals traded for in that heinous trade, between Africa and America. Is not a hate crime committed every time this hymn is sung?

Of course I understand the motivation that drove these youngsters to perform this act; I even understand the desire of the jury for them not to be punished for it. But did they truly not commit a crime, no matter how well motivated they were in doing so? I think once the Law is seen to be bent to breaking point in order to maintain a presentation of political correctness, a very dangerous precedent is set. There are other cases being heard as I post that could be affected by this verdict, not least the ongoing Extinction Rebellion cases. Have the defendants in that case not also acted to prevent a hate crime - a hate crime against the world itself, a world that they own? By all means, make the four's punishment light, explain the mitigation and say that for this reason blah, blah, blah, but it will not be tolerated again - but to acquit them altogether? It is a fairly rare occurrence that finds me in agreement with Ministers of the Government, but a number have expressed their disquiet over this judgement and on this occasion I think they are partially right. Where we differ is that they are concerned that the judgement gives an effective green light to 'mob-rule', to acts of arbitrary vandalism committed in what are simply conceived as being carried out with the right motivation. I, on the other hand, think that the damage is to the Law itself. If judgements like this are passed, then it will not be long before our political leaders decide that it is not fit for purpose and will seek to change it. I have little faith that any changes that they would decide upon would be to our, the people's, benefit. Twelve good men and silly.

[I'm Murrin]

Sounds to me like the entire reason for the verdict is that the destruction was not arbitrary at all. I quite like the reasoning here and appreciate a bit of consideration for the motivations of protestors. You run into far too many problems when you put rule of law onto a pedestal so high no one can question it.

[peter]

Is that a prerequisite for a charge of causing criminal damage? (Actually, I don't think that's correct anyway Murrin; as I understand it, alongside the reasons given above, I think the defence also claimed that the removal of the statue had the tacit support of the people of Bristol to whom it belonged.) I don't think it's so much a case of putting the Law on a pedestal as the far-reaching damage that is done when it is undermined. What is done in good faith today will be done unscrupulously tomorrow.

There is a rich history of breaking Law that is found to be wrong-footed in specific cases in this country (I think Lord Sumption gave a quote along the lines that it was a moral duty to do so) - but that comes along with an understanding that the Law has been broken and that there will be a price to pay.

Already there are whisperings that the Government will be considering changes to prevent this kind of circumvention - and I doubt that such changes will be to anyone's benefit if Priti Patel has a hand in them.


-------------------------------------POST'S4U---------------------------------


The business of Johnson's flat redecoration and the means by which the PM managed to get someone else to spring for it (after having claimed that he did so himself, iirc) raised it's grubby head in the news yesterday after revelations that he had withheld key messages between himself and Lord Brownlow, from his ethics advisor Lord Geidt.

Johnson it appears, had an exchange of messages with Brownlow which, if not directly agreeing to barter the cost of said decoration for Number 10 flat for in return, considering an idea of Brownlow's for a 'Festival of Britain' style affair, then at least connected the two. In a quiet little corner of the Times front page it was revealed that Johnson has apologised to Geidt for not telling him about the exchange when the latter was performing his investigation into the affair of the flat funding last year.

Will this story gain traction n the next couple of days? It could do - certainly if the ambitious Angela Rayner has anything to do with it. Flush from her successful appearance for Kier Stamer at the dispatch box of the Commons at the first PM's question time of the year (Stamer is isolating for the sixth time - anybody would think he didn't want to be in the office doing his job), she yesterday said that if the redecoration had been done in exchange for a shove from the PM of Brownlow's idea, then it was corruption plain and simple.

Well we all know that people like Brownlow do not do things like making gifts and donations for nothing Angela (no matter how much they'd like us to believe it) - grift is simply a part of the system - but equally we know that you want to heave yourself up above your own boss in the shouting about it (hell - you didn't even bother to hide the fact that you were after his job when Johnson jibed you about it at the box).

Naked ambition and political corruption; neither are nice to witness and side by side they sit, fully on view on our screens and in our papers for all of us to see. They are neither hidden nor is any shame displayed by the egregious perpetrators at the heads of our two main parties. The two are meat for each other and neither fit nor of sufficient rectitude for the positions they hold - and by this I refer both to the parties and to the individuals in question.

[peter]

I think Cail used to have that thing on the bottom of his posts that discourse comes in three levels: the lowest grade is that concerning people, followed by conversations around events and the last, the highest according to the 'scale', that concerning ideas.

I'm not much of an ideas man, but I do like to talk about events. I suppose my interest in politics sort of melds ideas and events together somewhat - I know what I believe to be the best system to strive toward (not that we seem to be headed anywhere in even the approximate direction I would choose) - and I suppose even talking about people plays into this (witness my above post). But alas, what I indulge in here is about where it begins and ends for me.

My poor wife (bless her cotton socks) gets to listen to me batter on about whatever issue of the day is driving me to distraction: she mostly agrees with me at the appropriate places (it's the easiest option to be fair) unless I'm egregiously out on a limb, at which point she, with a pithy sentence or rapier sharp observation, cuts the legs out from under me in the shortest of order. But besides that I don't do much political discussion anywhere else but here. My family, who I see fairly regularly, I tend to avoid discussing politics with, because we tend to end up arguing (and I love them so much that even if they were card carrying anthropophagists I'd probably finish up agreeing with them, so there isn't much point anyway). But my workmates, now they're a different matter.......

In places like the one I work in, it is the lowest form of discourse that tends to dominate the day - and boy does it just! I work in a team of (predictive text just threw up the word 'halfwits', but I resisted the temptation to allow it to derail my flow) people who get their chief pleasure from torturing each other, stabbing each other in the back, forming a complex network of alliances and hidden cabals, operating with the specific purpose of driving wedges in-between other groupings, and causing each other needless pain. I seriously would not have believed that twelve people, locked into a small space for a significant portion of the hours in a day (obviously in varying mixtures of groupings, shifting with the shifts as it were) could form such a complex network of hatreds and poisonous schemings as my lot. I simply would not believe it to be possible!

A, B and C will be aligned in their hatred of D and E and F, but A and E will have a sub-scheme to destroy C while D and A are aligned with F against C on a different issue. And that's just the day staff. Throw G, H and I into the mix as the evening workers, J, K and L as management (I say that word with inverted commas and throat clearing) and you have the makings of a simmering stew of everything that is vicious nasty and brutish in the human condition that it is possible to find. I mean seriously - it's a sociologists paradise! There would be doctorates to be had just performing the preliminary investigation into the Jigsaw of relationships!

And in amongst it all I swim, a tiddler amongst the professional sharks of the office politics game. I watch, I observe - occasionally I get a bit too close and get a passing bite. But of course I never, never, involve myself in their low level discourse do I. Because I, you see, am above it all. Yes I only have recourse to thought and communication at the higher levels of grade one and two. Under no circumstances could I be induced to stoop down to their level. Not I.

[peter]

Yesterday a "grim milestone" was passed in the UK journey through the Covid pandemic, with the death toll surpassing 150,000 recorded within 28 days of a positive Covid test.

I put the latter part of that sentence in italics because it must be important; reason - because every single paper that reported the 'story' this morning also gave that qualification alongside it.

Now we all know the apocryphal story of the man knocked down by a bus whose death is recorded as a Covid death because he had tested positive, but just how significant is it? Well, the truth is I can't tell you. Because if you try to ascertain the actual sub-set of deaths within this figure where Covid is listed as the primary cause of death....... suddenly there are no figures available. They can tell you to the single death that 28 days from a test figure, but the moment you try to find out the actual number of deaths attributable in larger part to the virus, you are confronted with graphs and bar charts and statistical degrees of confidence enough to make your head spin.

I tried to get this figure this morning, and the Office of National Statistics website assured me that in compliance with other freedom of information requests, the information I required was available, but (effectively) I'd have to collate it myself. I was directed to the link to the national statistics for the death records over the two year Covid period - and that was it. Okay. In other words the information is there, but you'll have to dedicate a few weeks of your time in order to access it.

Surely, given the blow to our lives, our wellbeing, our economy, our liberties, our futures, this is the least that we could expect. What exactly is it that they have to hide by not releasing this, the most pertinent statistic of all. Just how many people have died from this motherfucker - not with it - from it! Until I get this statistic I'm not the slightest bit interested in the death figures at all. They are meaningless.

Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (and Boris's new brexit negotiator post the departure of Lord Frost) is reported on the front of today's Telegraph as threatening the EU with triggering Article 16 (the unilateral opt-out clause of our exit treaty with the same) if they don't show some flexibility in their application of the Northern Ireland Protocol once the grace period of minimal appliance ends in the next few weeks. Now come on Liz - lets be honest here - no you won't. You won't because you can't. Because brexit is going downhill like a soap-box in the Red-Bull Challenge Cup and the last thing you can afford to do is to make it worse by tearing up the treaty which is about the only semi-floating straw of hope in the whole sorry mess.

The reason you are threatening this is because you want to convince all of the Telegraph readership (the ones who think you'll be weak as piss and collapse in front of EU demands like a wet paper bag in a rain-storm) that you're tough! You've got your sights on the top job and you need to take the hard-right no-dealers with you and this is your way of pleading with them for their support. But in truth, brexit is a shambles - not entirely due to it's own fault, granted, but a shambles nevertheless. Food is dearer not cheaper: energy prices are soaring not coming down, the millions a day to the health service - well it's simply better to not talk about that and the lucrative free trade deals have turned out not to be so lucrative or so free as expected. So no - you won't be pulling any Article 16 malarkey and the EU know it. They will do what they always do; they'll bide their time, be patient and wait until we come crawling in at the back door, prepared to accept all of their conditions while shouting from the rafters that "We are the Winners!" in the media. Nice try Liz but you're as transparent as the Christmas window in Harrods, but unlike the crap displayed therein, in your case no-one but a raving idiot (ie the average Telegraph reader) is going to buy it.

[peter]

We are homing in now on the nub of what this thing is all about.

Earlier on I was on YouTube and saw amongst the small line of dedicated news vids, two BBC postings on the 'grim milestone' mentioned above. One was on the unimaginable nature of the scale of the death due to Covid, which finished with a warning that the pandemic was far from over, the other a less emotive but equally doomsday presentation of the toll. I was minded to ask in the comments if anyone - anyone - could please tell me the number of deaths among the 150,000 figure where Covid was listed as the primary cause, and duly posted my question before glancing down the screen at the previously posted comments. To my surprise and gratification, every comment as far as I went down, was asking either the same question, or a variation thereof, with a few interspersed comments about the collateral death toll of the Covid policies we have followed - the elephant in the room that no-one seems to want to talk about.

Yesterday I heard Peter Hitchens saying that whenever you confronted people with the arguments that the modelling of the epidemiologists seems from the start to have been wildly adrift (to put it kindly) and that the restrictions/lockdowns/masks might have actually been an overreaction, you are always given the return answer, "well without the policies the death toll could have been much worse", to which, as he said, there is of course no answer (it being merely speculation, but with little evidence to confirm or confute it with).

In today's press, the focus seems to be, now that the real world evidence seems to be pointing in the direction that the NHS is not going to be overwhelmed (any more than it always is every winter as a result of it's long standing neglect by the party that now claims to have its well-being at the core of its policies), we are not going to see a "tidal-wave" of death and serious illness as a result of Omicron, of how we are going to adapt to living with Covid as with any other endemic virus.

And here is the rub. The extension of the emergency powers that Government granted itself runs out at the end of March and the question is will they be renewed?

My response to this is, "Do bears shit in the woods?" Anybody who believes that the Government - our Government headed by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel and the like - are going to hand back even a single grain of the bucket full of powers they grasped unto themselves under the justification of this farce of a pandemic is, in my opinion, away with the faries.

All of the talk is of reducing the isolation period to five days and scrapping the free testing (yes, that'll be a good money spinner if you don't simultaneously scrap the test and isolation mandates won't it?) is bullshit. That's not returning to normal. Normal is when I decide when I can and cannot go to work - or play, or out to visit my family. Normal is when I decide what country I want to go to on holiday - and do so (as my passport states) without let or hindrance in the form of pre and post travel testing or some clown telling me I'm on a red-zone or something. Normal is when I don't have to don a mask to go into a shop (or wear a tag telling everyone I'm 'exempt' if I don't); where I'm not confronted by people with filthy scraps of material hanging under their dripping noses everywhere I go and don't have to feel guilty if I have the temerity to so much as even cough in a public place. Normal is where every single broadcast of the news doesn't tell me how many people are in hospital, how many have died, how many have tested positive for this that and the other, and every other aspect of what is going on in the world is sidelined in pursuit of the deification of the smallest scrap of news about the minutest shift in infection rates, R values and any other manipulable statistic that could serve to back up the mainstream narrative. Normal is where people are not coerced and manipulated with misleading statistics, where they are not poked and prodded into a state of fear for purposes of instilling compliance, where they are not cajoled into taking vaccine whether they like it or not, where their lives and livelihoods are not threatened if they decline to tow the party line.

So media - don't talk to me about "returning to normal" and then tinker around the edges talking about "reducing the isolation period to five days." Either do the thing properly, make"returning to normal" actually be about returning to normal or do us all a favour and just dissapear. Your pursuit of ratings and money, your adoption of the policy that 'bad news sells', has been as much responsible for this as anything else.

What we have experienced has been an example of collective human folly at the global level the like of which has never been seen before. Let's hope and pray that we can learn from it how we have the capacity to be our own worst enemy: how science raised to the level of religion can be as destructive a force, as hindering a tether to our collective well-being and ongoing advancement, as superstition and ignorance ever was.

[Forestal]

I'm not an expert and I haven't done the mathematics to discover how many deaths were actually caused by Covid19, but the best way to work out what the possible primary deaths may have been (without doing several weeks of statistical analysis) is to look at the excess deaths. The chart below shows the UK and you can clearly see the main spikes of Covid deaths on it. (Currently there are only 18 countries which are showing lower or equal excess deaths than expected, and most of these are tiny nations, although Australia, New Zealand and Canada are exceptions.)



This chart basically shows the deaths that occured above the expected "normal" level of deaths we would expect to see in the UK each year. At present, about 11% of deaths above normal, and since that was 607,922 (in England and Wales - Northern Ireland and Scotland don't seem to publish their numbers combined), taking 11% of that returns 66,871 unpredicted deaths. (That is if it were 11% over the entire year, which it was not, it was likely closer to 20% on average, given the enormous spike early on, which could boost the numbers considerably.)

Which yes, is an estimate and considerly lower than then 150,000 that is being thrown around in the media, but that's still a lot of people. Having lost people personally, I don't think the most of the measures up until this point were unreasonable, at least pre-vaccine. The current farce of passports and playing around with isolation times and charging for tests is becoming a stretch as the moment the public have to purchase tests, no one is going to do so. Test-and-trace and the passport system were of course just another way for the Tories to funnel money to their buddies at the public's expence.

Never the less, hope this helps.

[peter]

Thanks Forestal.

I wonder how many of those excess deaths were because of suicide, of failure to present, or because of missed treatments. Is it not possible that excess deaths could just as easily be read as a measure of the effect of lockdown, of the single minded switch of our attention to Covid, at the expense of every other kind of medical emergency?

I'm absolutely cognisant of the heartache that each and every death, from Covid or whatever cause, brings. My sympathy extends of course, even more personally to you as a member of the Watch, and of course I understand absolutely that this will influence the way you see how our response to this situation has progressed.

Given the uncertainties with which the original (wild-type) Sars-CoV2 virus burst upon the world in the early days, yes of course, precautions were necessary. But it rapidly became clear that we were dealing with a viral disease of the elderly and immunocompromised, who's ability to inflict serious harm on the vast bulk of people was limited to the fractions of a percent. This is in no sense to lessen the value of life of those at risk individuals, and a clear policy of ring-fencing of the vulnerable would have made absolute sense, and still does. But set the risk from Covid, even in its wild-type pathogenicity, against that of the Mers virus of a few years ago which killed forty percent of all the people it infected - and by comparison the risk is insignificant. Had the Sars-CoV2 virus had that level of pathogenicity then the consequences would have been horrendous.

But it didn't.

Set against this knowledge we must now live with the consequences of what we have done and try to ascertain whether we have caused far greater damage in the long run, in terms of life-hours lost, economic consequences and societal damage (education fallout etc). And the ongoing consequences in terms of liberties and the reduction of our ability to deal with future pandemics that might actually have the destructive capabilities of Mers is not even addressed in these. (As an indicator, I heard one professor of oncology say that a figure of 750,000 early deaths resultant from late diagnosis and postponed treatment of cancer had been predicted.)

Given these absolutely pressing questions it would seem a no-brainer that the actual number of people who have died with Covid as the significant primary cause of death (in other words, those without co-morbidities that we could reasonably have expected to cause their deaths in the near future without the presence of the virus) is a key piece of knowledge to hold in making these assessments. Yet for whatever reasons, the people who give us these figures and graphs with such confidence, seem suddenly coy when it comes to delivering this particular number.

And certainly, with today's headlines in mind, it seems that everybody and his mother is now calling for the pandemic to be put back in its box. Suddenly everyone wants us to "learn to live with Covid''. Even Michael Gove who, but a short week or two ago was calling for the introduction of tighter regulations, is today on that bandwagon.

Well certainly from the other main story, the members of Number 10 Downing Street have learned to live with it. In fact they'd learned to live with it back in the middle of May 2020 when the rest of us were not even allowed to gather in groups of more than two people outside. By accounts, less than an hour after we, the public, had been warned against meeting in groups, Johnson's principal private secretary was issuing invites to a "bring your own bottle" party in the Rose Garden, an event to which some forty or fifty people came, including the PM and his wife Carrie.

And the reason that they had learned to live with it (and this is the significant point of this story) is that they weren't scared. They understood that the risk to the average person was minimal and were simply not bothered by it. While they were spreading the fear of God into the rest of us, with their yellow and black striped podiums and Clive Myrie broadcasting from outside of hospital morgues, they themselves couldn't give a toss.

And now that they have been caught bang to rights (as they always were going to be - which of us ever thought that Johnson was obeying the rules he had set for the rest of us..... I'd lay ten to one he was at the Christmas parties as well), now that they have been caught bang to rights, what will their excuse be? Well, they can't get out of it, the party happened, we've got the email and no denial that the PM was there - so there's only one way out. They won't like using it, but will have no choice, and that is that Number 10 Downing Street is not covered by the same laws that the rest of the country labours under. As Crown property, they are allowed to do things that the rest of us are forbidden from undertaking. It doesn't look good - in fact it stinks - but they'll have to use it. It's a tacit confirmation that it's one law for you lot and another law for us..... but there you have it. Suck it up.

[peter]

It does not.... look....good.

Those would be the words spoken to Boris Johnson by even his best friend as they surveyed this morning's coverage of his premiership's self-immoliation in the fallout from the Dominic Cummings revealed party held during the height of lockdown in May 2020. (Revenge is a dish best eaten cold eh Dom?)

Having revealed the holding of the bash in question (which was held a few days after the notorious 'drinks on the verandah picture' - only work being done..... nothing to see here) in the garden of 10 Downing Street, there is little doubt that Cummings was also the source of the leaked email that actually revealed the 'invite' sent to 100 of the PM's staff. Cummings himself appears to be in the clear in respect of having attended the shindig (by accounts he questioned its legality at the time) but others are not. Leader of the SNP in the House of Commons Ian Blackford, even questioned yesterday whether the very woman appointed to lead the investigation into the parties issue, Sue Gray, was at the party herself: there is also the suggestion that a number of other senior Ministers might have been in attendance.

The wording of the invite is itself damning. Suggesting that staff come and enjoy the fine weather, and bring their own booze, it was sent out only hours after the public had been warned to abide by the rules (that no more than two people were allowed to meet outside), up to 10,000 people had been fined for breaking them, and people who had visited the beach the previous weekend had been pilloried in the press as 'covidiots' and selfish fools who cared nothing for the safety of their fellow countrymen who were stuck at home obeying the rules.

An urgent question raised in the House yesterday pertaining to the matter brought yet more woe for Johnson. Deputy Leader of the Labour Party Angela Rayner was scathing in her criticism of the PM, pouring contempt down on his absent head - for indeed, he himself had not had the courage to come to the House to answer the charge that the party had been held, and that he had been at it. Deputising some poor schmuck to attend and sit in his place, it was also an ominous sign that not a single member of his front bench had turned up to support him. Delivering the rather lame excuse (to say the least) that "the matter is under investigation and it wouldn't be right to comment on it", the schmuck was generally received with sympathy by the House, as having been given the shit end of the stick.

But if this morning's headlines are anything to go by, the proverbial has really hit the fan. "Contempt for the Victims" screams one headline, while the much respected FT labels this as a " potentially terminal showdown" for Johnson's leadership. The Times has "Say Sorry or Doom us all, say Ministers" and the Telegraph tells us that he is loosing Tory support (an understatement if ever there was one). Out in the country as high as two thirds of the people questioned believe that he should resign.

All of which makes the PM's appearance at question time in the Commons later today a much anticipated event. He might have been able to dodge yesterday's appearance but today's must be faced up to, like it or not. No doubt, he'd like to find a reason to be elsewhere - say down in Antarctica - but it is not to be. That he is going to be roasted, there is no question of: but how will he respond? The general feeling is that he should 'fess up' and throw himself before the mercy of the Court (not that he can expect much). Yesterday saw MP after MP, both within the Commons and without, expressing their outrage at what had occurred while the rest of us were in the limbo of lockdown - one even broke down in tears as he described to the House how his mother-in-law had died alone - and today will be the reckoning.

I'm still of the opinion that ultimately the Government will get off the hook via the small-print clause that says Crown buildings are not subject to the same laws as the rest of the country, but this will not do the PM much good in the House today. He will be expected to address the questions of whether he knew about the party (in which case his earlier claim to the House that he knew nothing of any parties that had been held on his property seems pretty shakey), and whether he was at the party or not. The legality of the party or otherwise will be decided elsewhere and at another time - the question today will be about his own personal involvement. If he does indeed confess all (which, normally being drawn to the philosophy that 'an ounce of lie can save a ton of explanation', he won't like at all) he will then have to face the question as to whether he has deliberately misled the House by his denials of knowledge in his former appearances at the dispatch box. And this, if established, could actually be a resigning matter.

But what are his alternatives? If he declines to answer the questions (in his normal manner) he's going to be eaten for breakfast by the opposition leaders. He can't lie and say he knew nothing, or he wasn't there - there's bound to be a photo somewhere to prove differently, or another attendee who, for a bit of advancement, will be prepared to shop him in. No, his alternatives to the come-clean policy are pretty thin on the ground. I think he'll have to go for it and tough it out at the box, then rely on the Crown property loophole to get him off the legal hook. He'll make his apology (while dressing it up in some spurious justification) as soon as he hits the dispatch box, so that he can lay the groundwork and then refer his later answers to difficult questions back to his earlier one as they come. He won't show an ounce of contrition, but will rely on his teflon coating to slide past any criticism until the end of the session. But will he get away with it - that is the question?

So it's all eyes on the PM's box - if you'll pardon the expression.

[peter]

There is one really telling sentence in this morning's coverage of the PM's frankly embarrassing 'apology' to the House yesterday, and surprisingly that was to be found in a satirically on-point opinion piece by Juliet Samuel on the front of the Telegraph. Amidst all of the furore surrounding the PM's carefully chosen words - an apology for what the Downing Street event looked like to the millions of angry people (while never actually saying whether it was or was not a work event, just that he implicitly believed it was) - amidst this and the recriminations and political fallout from the debacle, came the following telling sentence.

The obvious answer is that Mr Johnson knew what was going on (ie a party {my parenthesis}) and thought little of it, because he knew his own laws were so ridiculous that they ought to be ignored. (Again, my italics.)

Just repeat those words to yourself. He knew his own laws were so ridiculous that they ought to be ignored.

In other words - and this is the key lesson to be taken from all of this - the attendees at the party had heard all of the same stuff about this illness as the rest of us, but knew that this was an illness of the elderly and vulnerable - and weren't scared. That the laws were so disproportionate to the threat, so ridiculous, that they ought to be ignored.

That sentence that tells us everything we need to know, to understand, about what has been done to this country over the past two years. Whether Johnson weathers this storm or not, whether the Tories gird up their courage and chuck the c*** out or not is neither here nor there. All of the hor air and words flying back and forth, whether Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak support him, whether he has "done enough" to buy off the backbenchers, whether 53 letters are winging their way into the 1922 Committee inbox - all of this isn't worth a fart. By concentrating on this parochial stuff, the political rather than the existential, the media fails to get what is actually the real story here - the huge, the staggering, and world-changing significance of the crime that has been perpetrated on us.

Our lives have been ripped asunder, we have been locked in our houses, subjected to fear mongering propoganda and covert behavioural modification techniques, vilified if we fail to bow down to the new God of science, coerced into acceptance of barely tested pharmaceutical interventions. Our societal cohesion has been tested to its limits, we have been denied the opportunity to be alongside our dying loved ones, to mourn at their funerals, to be at the weddings of our youngsters, to even meet with our friends and families. Our economy has been trashed, our lives works redced to ashes, our futures mortgaged, our liberties snatched away and an authoritarian yoke placed around our necks from which we may never release ourselves - and all by a disproportionate reaction to a minimal threat and the imposition of laws that even the man who dreamed them up thought were so ridiculous that they ought to be ignored.

Now if that doesn't make your blood boil, if that doesn't make you want to turn your back on everything you know and go and live in the woods, if that doesn't make you feel sick to the pit of your stomach - then I have only this to say to you. It should. It should.

I absolutely understand the need to hide oneself from the enormity of what has been done here - it is simply to big to face head-on without feeling one's mind stretched almost to breaking point. But it is time to put on those glasses from the film They Live - to see past or through the posters, to see those big black letters spelling out the word OBEY, and to get to grips with what has transpired here, what has been done. I suspect that few of us will have the capacity to do this (though history will be less fearful) and will be ridiculed for doing so. We have been through one of humanities odd periods of mass psychosis and are at last emerging 'blinking into the light'. The best we can hope for is that posterity will learn a lesson from our folly, but I won't hold my breath.

[wayfriend]

Just repeat those words to yourself. He knew his own laws were so ridiculous that they ought to be ignored.

FYI, that's an interpretation that is designed from the bottom to the top to fit into a pre-existing narrative, thereby re-enforcing the pre-existing narrative, whether or not it is actually true.

You can also consider the interpretation that the laws were designed to change the cumulative outcome of millions, and that Boris et al considered the actions of a mere few to have no serious consequence.

You can also consider the interpretation that Boris et al live in a world where they never have to worry about whether or not the hospitals are overflowing and turning away dying people, because their good care is assured.

And you can also consider an interpretation that Boris et al considered themselves above the law.

[peter]

Hi Wayfriend!

Someone on the radio yesterday asked the question, do you think these people would have been gathering together at these Downing Street parties if this had been the bubonic plague?

Certainly and without question they exist in a bubble that doesn't consider itself subject to the same laws as the rest of the country - hell, we have had people fined life changing amounts of money for doing far less than what transpired here - up to ten thousand pounds in some cases.

But it is looking increasingly academic anyway. You see, the woman that Boris Johnson has deputised to carry out the investigation only has the remit to do so into the civil service side of the matter. She is a civil servant (who actually received an invite to the same said party) herself and this investigation has the status of an internal civil service investigation, no more. Commissioned by the PM, she will report to the PM, and we the public will not see that report. We will get a summary of it from Downing Street itself (read the PM). She has no power, no remit to extend her investigation or observations into ministerial attendance and the say as to whether this was a works event (("technically within the law" as Johnson so carefully put it in front of the Commons) is hers to make. The police have said that they will not investigate this as a criminal event unless she finds it to have been so, or finds some question about its legality in her report. They will not actually see the report either, so will only have the PM's word (worth exactly nothing) as to whether a crime has been committed or not. If nothing else, Johnson should receive that million pound prize from the maths community for being the first person to successfully square a circle - not usually recognised as being possible, but he has nevertheless managed it. Was the event (now being called the "Shrodingers Party" following the Telegraph article I refered to yesterday - both a party and not a party simultaneously) that could end the PM's tenure if it was a crime, a crime or not? Who better to open the sealed envelope and tell us what the contents say (those contents decided upon by a person who was very possibly at one or more of the eleven similar events that took place herself) without ever having to show us what he is reading from the card therein, but the PM himself? And the police then decide whether to investigate the matter or not on his say so.

It's a thing of beauty by any standards, and we must bow down in awe at the sleight of hand, the sheer skill of the legerdemain in creating it.

How many people will be as incandescent about this flagrant example of (words fail me) corruption, of double standards as I am? We could organise a protest, but under the laws set up by the administration to deal with the pandemic it would no doubt be a crime to do so. If the people ever doubted that it is 'one law for us - another law for them' then they need look no further than this for confirmation. Already the scene is being set for blame to be shifted from the PM and his cohort to the civil servants who organised this party. The PM has said that he never saw the email inviting people to "come and enjoy the fine weather" and "bring your own booze", just to further distance himself from the event, and no doubt some heads will roll at the top end of the Downing Street staff as scapegoats. Meanwhile, that the PM and his squeeze actually attended the illegal gathering will be bypassed altogether.

To put it into context just how egregious this flouting of the rules was, bear in mind that thousands of people were served with fixed penalty fines for trifling infractions of these rules, and numbers were arraigned in the courts and levied with heavy penalties for the same. In one case two students received fines of ten thousand pounds each for organising a snowball fight later in the year. To say that something is rotten in the heart of Denmark would be an understatement. Needless to say, the PM does not expect anyone to actually believe that he "thought that this was a works event". Kier Stamer stood at the dispatch box and accused the PM of taking the people of this country to be fools. He doesn't. He simply doesn't care what the people of this country think. His only interest was getting through that particular session of PM's Questions, of appearing to seem contrite to his backbenchers, of buying their 'forgiveness' and staving off a rebellion in the ranks. That and setting up the groundwork for his slithering through the PR disaster that his indolence and disregard for his own laws had allowed to develop. It was an example of the Teflon PM at his finest.

We, the UK public have been taken for fools. We have voted in the most unfit and disreputable PM in the history of our nation, a man that were he not protected by the velvet mail of the establishment, of 'belonging to the club', would likely by now be languishing in one of our prisons - and we are paying the price for it. I wish I were one of the mindless sheep I come across every day who simply don't care what their leaders are up to - who, if you try to explain it to them offer up only their blank incomprehension of what you are talking about, whose main concern is what the next episode of Coronation Street is going to serve up. Perhaps then I'd sleep better at night, be a happier and better individual less tormented by the injustice and chicanery I see all around me? But woe is me - for that I cannot do.

[wayfriend]

Someone on the radio yesterday asked the question, do you think these people would have been gathering together at these Downing Street parties if this had been the bubonic plague?

There is no doubt in my mind that they would have been. (Just as there is no doubt in my mind that there would be a faction claiming the bubonic plague is nothing to worry about. In this case, they'd be right -- modern medicine has made this an easily curable ailment. I think the radio person failed to choose a properly more virulent disease. They should have went with Ebola.)

But it is looking increasingly academic anyway.

I thought that the political norm that at this point Johnson should voluntarily resign, for flagrantly violating his own directives (be they right or wrong).

We, the UK public have been taken for fools. We have voted in the most unfit and disreputable PM in the history of our nation

Gosh, I cannot imagine what that would be like.

[wayfriend]

Well, peter, you did wonder ....

UK government apologizes to Queen for 'suitcase of wine' parties on eve of Prince Philip's funeral

Of all the recent revelations of lockdown-busting parties held by Britain's top officials, the latest report may be the most damaging yet.

On the night before Prince Philip's funeral last April, with the nation in official mourning and Queen Elizabeth preparing to lay to rest her husband of nearly 74 years, alcohol-fueled gatherings took place at UK government offices in 10 Downing Street, as first reported by The Telegraph newspaper.

So it's not the pandemic mandates that are to blame.

[Fist and Faith]

We, the UK public have been taken for fools. We have voted in the most unfit and disreputable PM in the history of our nation

Gosh, I cannot imagine what that would be like.

[peter]

(Wayfriend - see post after this one. )

Phew! Another day another revelation.

And this ones a beauty! It transpires that on the night before Prince Phillip's funeral, while our Queen sat in mourning, in the seat of her Government, Number 10 Downing Street not one, but two parties were simultaneously in progress. Carrying on into the early hours of the morning, the riotous affairs eventually fused into one, music was played in the basement with a top Downing Street official acting as impromptu DJ, a reveller was sent out to buy a suitcase full of wine and to cap it all, in the midst of the wild shenanigans the Prime Minister's son's swing was broken.



I wish I got invited to parties like that - lockdown or no lockdown!

Yesterday Downing Street was forced to issue a shamefaced apology to the Queen and while there is no suggestion that Boris Johnson was in attendance at these boozy shindigs, there has been little doubt cast on the argument that, such were the high positions that the organisers held, there can be little doubt that they would have gone ahead had there been any question that he would not have given them his approval had he been consulted.

Johnson himself is keeping a low profile and digging in for the long haul. Due to make a visit in the North of the country yesterday, he suddenly found the need to self-isolate as a result of 'one of his family members testing positive' (nb. there is no regulatory requirement for him to do so - he just thought it wise not to take any chances ), which of course meant he couldn't be cornered by the press about the latest party revelations. One commentator pointed out that we now have established that we are being led by a man who is both a liar and a coward: not traits that one really wants to see in the individual steering the ship.

I agree with all that, but where I differ with many people is in their belief that Johnson has screwed it all up. One person said to me, "He should have simply come clean and apologized!" Wrong. He'd have been damned as a law breaker and hypocrite and would have been expected to fall on his sword in the same manner as Matt Hancock, Allegra Stratton and a score of others since this thing began.

What he rather did in the Commons the other day was very, very cunning. He muddied the waters, created a grey area between what was work and what was social, put himself in the workish part of that and then established the "technically legal" aspect of what had gone on. He then built a wall behind which to shelter in the form of pleading for everyone to "wait for the results of the enquiry" which he promised to abide by. (He could do that because he knows that he will be cleared by it: he after all, is the person who decides what actions must be taken in the light of its findings.) He apologized for "what things looked like", not what had been done, explained that it was the public perception that was at fault, not the actuality of what had occurred, and then fell back on the inquiry ruse. It was cleverly done and I think he'll get away with it. Morally however..... well that's a different matter.

Now, given the clear conflicts of interest involved in the internal - not independent - inquiry that Sue Gray is carrying out, that she herself was a recipient of invitations to at least one of these parties, that she reports to Johnson himself, that he gets to decide on how her findings are reported and what actions should be taken..... given that these problems were being reported, it was instructive to see yesterday, how quickly the Downing Street machine swung into action in order to change the narrative. Suddenly the news reports were full of spokespeople, many Tories included, who were issuing warnings to Johnson and the Government that "If they think Sue Gray will roll over and play ball they have another think coming! She has a reputation for absolute resoluteness and scrupulous impartiality in these matters: it was her who had Damien Green sacked when he was found to have porn on his office computer!" I heard this kind of thing from a number of different commentators - sufficient to tell me that the observations were being orchestrated from a single source. And it isn't rocket science to work out what that source is.

Funny then how the Times newspaper were able to yesterday tell us what the results of the inquiry would be, a week or more before it is due to report. That no law would be found to have been broken, that the civil servants concerned, while being ill advised in what they had done at times, had not essentially broken the law, so Downing Street was in the clear. Certainly there will be much criticism and warnings to be more careful in future, but Boris Johnson will walk away unscathed.

Have the Times got an inside line into the Sue Gray inquiry, have they a crystal ball in which to see the future? Of course not. It's simply that the direction that this strategy for getting the PM off the particularly nasty hook he has got himself into is taking, is blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain, with two open eyes to see with.

The latest party revelations are a problem - people won't like these - but Johnson himself is distanced enough from them to escape most of the fallout. It is the culture within Number 10 that he has overseen, has allowed to develop that will (quite deliberately) become the thrust of media attention. Told to "clean up his act" and given a wrist slapping, that is a criticism he can walk away from.

[peter]

Sorry Wayfriend - this post should have come before my previous one, but I wanted to get my thoughts on the latest developments down while still fresh in my mind from reading this morning's press coverage down before I lost my thread (as it were).

No - you are quite right about the bubonic plague observation, but in fairness, the commentator did say "bubonic plague or ebola" - I just forgot to say it in my post. I even thought about it yesterday after posting but frankly was too lazy to come back and correct it. But you get the point that they were trying to make anyway - that the Covid virus was simply not in the same ballpark and the Downing Street party goers were well aware of this. Even the Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg stood up in the House the other day and admitted that the Covid restrictions "may have been a bit too harsh". In other words they were disproportionate to the threat we actually faced. At no point in the pre-pandemic planning of either the WHO or the UK Government (to deal with a viral pandemic of this, or even a more dangerous, nature) were the ideas of locking down the healthy population or the closure of businesses ever included. It was only after seeing the options followed by the Chinese government, and then successfully introduced in Italy, that the rest of the world began to realise that they too (in the words of epidemiologist modeller Professor Neil Ferguson) might be able to "get away with it".

As for Johnson's falling on his sword - well, I hope that my above post will explain something about the way he is going about avoiding that eventuality having to be followed. He has absolutely no intention of doing this unless absolutely backed into a corner with no other option available to him. My bet is that he will succeed and walk away, bruised but alive to fight another day.

Lastly, couldn't help smiling when I read on the side of the box of lateral flow testing kits delivered to my house yesterday that they were "Made in China".



( Edit The Telegraph reports that Boris Johnson is plotting his leadership fightback by planning to lift restrictions and scrap 'plan B' (the current status under which we sit in respect of our Covid restrictions), including the scrapping of vaccination passports. Apparently (and with suspiciously good timing for the PM) the science now supports such liftings, particularly now that suddenly the modelling techniques developed by Warwick University are being preferred - always less doom laden than the Imperial College ones that have been utilised up to date. If this is not proof positive that our Governments have been shoehorning the data into fitting whatever narrative they wanted to prevail at any given time during this pandemic then I don't know what is!

Also, glad to hear that Simon Case, cabinet secretary to the PM did not attend the leaving party held for Kate Josephs, Director General of the Cabinet Office Task force (and effectively the person who wrote up the rules of the very lockdown her party was held in contravention off). Well he couldn't could he? He was attending the party being held in his own office at the time! Man, it just gets better and better doesn't it?)

[peter]

Gosh - even I'm starting to get worn down by all of this, but, like the PM himself I have little choice but to carry on regardless in my attempts to document the daily development of this business.

The two big Sunday hitters, the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times take somewhat different tacks on the only story in town, that of the PM's ongoing problems with the party scandal.

In the Times we read how he intends to attempt to sate the public desire for retribution with a bloodbath of decapitations at the top level of his Downing Street team. Never one to take the blame himself for any of the disasters he brings down upon himself, he is not averse to slowing down his pursuers by littering his trail with the bodies of his underlings as he flees away. He has followed this tactic many times before and word has it that he is once again sharpening his knives. By all accounts, last week he ranted at them en masse, casting blame around to all and sundry - himself excepted - and saying how could they have let this happen to him?

But on to the business of actually surviving the mess and we have apparently a two pronged campaign, the arms of which have been given..... colourful, shall we say.....names befitting our PM's childlike personality. Operation Save Big Dog is the operation whereby, using both charm offensive and threats, his parliamentary MPs will be cajoled back into line and brought back from the brink of their current state of excitation, in which they threaten to throw him off into the abyss. Word has it that something like 35 of the necessary 53 (I think) letters of no confidence have been sent in to the 1922 Committee - to bloody close for comfort by far - and Johnson's team will be expected to make sure that no more go in.

The second arm of the campaign, Operation Red Meat, involves as previously mentioned, slaking the public thirst for blood with an orgy of retributive sackings, together with a fistful of crowd pleasing measures, chief of which will be the tearing up of Covid restrictions, rumoured to be taking place within next ten days. Other lesser stuff like using the army to repel the boat-fulls of migrants crossing the Chanel and revealing new plans to aid in the cost of living crisis and in the levelling up agenda are also part of the plan. In other words, feed the beast with fresh meat until it is slumberous and lethargic, and ready to go of to sleep once more.

The Sunday Telegraph, whose daily sister paper actually broke the most damaging story of all - that of the parties on the eve of Prince Phillip's funeral - has come up with a photograph of the PM's wife Carrie Johnson breaking social distancing rules by hugging a friend at an engagement party (only six people, presumably allowed at the time as long as they were socially distanced) that took place in a private club in Covent Garden. Downing Street/Johnson has been quick to offer an apology for this "momentary lapse", but it is no different in kind, to the offence that caused Matt Hancock to resign (though with slightly different intentions on the part of the huggers, hem-hem) and should be seen in this light, irrespective of the seemingly innocent nature of the transgression.

It's funny how the Telegraph group, previously so supportive of Johnson, has suddenly turned on its political champion and now threatens to be among the top entities responsible for driving the final nails into his political coffin. There are rumours that some hefty Tory Party donors are well unhappy with what is going on, and nothing is likely to bring Johnson down faster than if this starts to effect the Party coffers; I wonder if this is a sign that the true rulers of this country - the oligarchy of private wealth and power that has its feet firmly under the top table - has finally decided that Johnson has to go. If this is the case then for sure his fate is sealed already, irrespective of the Sue Gray report and whatever plans he has to effect a reprieve.

If this is indeed the case, perhaps he (like me, in my exhausted state) should simply chuck in the towel.

Edit: I have just finished watching Trevor Phillips interviewing the culture secretary Oliver Dowden on his Sunday morning political slot on Sky news. Phillips, who's daughter died of anorexia in April of last year, spoke movingly about the loss and grief he experienced at not being able to be with her in this time of her most desperate need: indeed he struggled to hold back his tears as he faced the man before him who's job it was to defend the indefensible.

I have waxed lyrical about all of the news as reported in the media but nothing - nothing - could bring this home more than to be confronted with the grief one of the individuals - parents, children, family members - whose numbers must run into the thousands, possibly tens of thousands, against whom this most egregious of wrongs has been perpetrated. Phillips may have the platform, but his story is repeated in households up and down the length and breadth of the country. It must have made Dowden sick to his stomach to be in the insidious position of having to stand up for the people behind these crimes, and I think you could see some of this in his face as he tried to respond to the devastating evidence of what has been done to people like Phillips laid bare before him.

To any who feel that this is a situation that must be brushed aside, that nothing is gained by dredging over the dirt, raking over the coals as it were, of these retrospective offences, I recommend you to search out the interview and see if you still feel the same at its conclusion.