[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

The action itself is a molehill, I'll give you that. I don't actually care that Cummings went on his jollies. If they just said "Err... **** wups yes that wasn't a good decision" then whatever. Keep him on, it is what it is.

...the lying, denial that the rules that were broadcast repeatedly to the whole nation were ever the rules, the changing the websites so that the rules read differently... trying to change the past and tell people that they're imagining it? I don't think that's a molehill. That's some pretty serious misconduct.

Doublethink?

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Unless anyone has evidence to refute his account then all they are doing is showing a spiteful "I didn't get my own way in the election or referendum" side

And surely the good burgers of Tibb would never

Also

How dare his parents live 260 miles from London the selfish pigs

It doesn't matter if you believe his account or not, his account is against the rules. Travelling to visit family was against the rules. Driving 30 miles to another location for exercise was against the rules. They might be going back and trying to change them now, but most of us have memories longer than a couple of weeks.

Local walking spots and beaches around here had their car parks taped off by the police, because driving to them was against the rules. My wife hasn't been to see her grandparents who are not doing well at all right now and live 270-ish miles from us (along with her whole family) because it's against the rules.

The rules NOW are clear as mud but the original rules were perfectly clear and - going entirely on HIS own words - he broke them twice. Again I'd say whether or not you think that's a big deal is totally up to the individual... but the govt. fiddling things to go back and change the rules, and claim they never existed, is another matter.

[LeatherTrumpet]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

It doesn't matter if you believe his account or not, his account is against the rules. Travelling to visit family was against the rules. Driving 30 miles to another location for exercise was against the rules. They might be going back and trying to change them now, but most of us have memories longer than a couple of weeks.

Local walking spots and beaches around here had their car parks taped off by the police, because driving to them was against the rules. My wife hasn't been to see her grandparents who are not doing well at all right now and live 270-ish miles from us (along with her whole family) because it's against the rules.

The rules NOW are clear as mud but the original rules were perfectly clear and - going entirely on HIS own words - he broke them twice. Again I'd say whether or not you think that's a big deal is totally up to the individual... but the govt. fiddling things to go back and change the rules, and claim they never existed, is another matter.

It's advice and within the advice is more than enough to ambiguity in to cover individual circumstances. The gen public have invented "rules".

It's nothing more than faux outrage to disguise political class spitefulness.

[Marsh.]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

It's advice and within the advice is more than enough to ambiguity in to cover individual circumstances. The gen public have invented "rules".

It's nothing more than faux outrage to disguise political class spitefulness.

Nothing like completely changing your stance on the guidelines depending on the thread. Embarrassment.

[Marsh.]

Originally Posted by Livia

It's one thing Cummings making a mockery out of the most vulnerable in our society, but people continue to do so. Disgusting.

[LeatherTrumpet]

Originally Posted by Marsh.

Nothing like completely changing your stance on the guidelines depending on the thread. Embarrassment.

Different circumstances different people, very loose guidelines to cover 67 milion individuals. It's easy.

[Marsh.]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Different circumstances different people, very loose guidelines to cover 67 milion individuals. It's easy.

Very specific guidelines.

But inventing things is easier than opening your eyes.

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

It's advice and within the advice is more than enough to ambiguity in to cover individual circumstances. The gen public have invented "rules".

It's nothing more than faux outrage to disguise political class spitefulness.

It wasn't "just advice" when the police were chasing hikers off the hills... how odd. You also seemed pretty clear on it here;

https://www.thisisbigbrother.com/for...d.php?t=366239

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

sacking offense

end of

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

She is coming from a city area to a small rural community, and her family, increasing infection risk there massively. It's beyond recklass

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Deliberate and calculated flouting of the rules twice set by the Scottish government in order to save lives.
Is not a minor offence by the country s leading medical officer ffs

...had a rethink since then, have you?

[Marsh.]

Not a rethink, a "doesn't think at all".

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Different circumstances different people, very loose guidelines to cover 67 milion individuals. It's easy.

They are almost identical circumstances.

[Nicky91]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Unless anyone has evidence to refute his account then all they are doing is showing a spiteful "I didn't get my own way in the election or referendum" side

And surely the good burgers of Tibb would never

Also

How dare his parents live 260 miles from London the selfish pigs

well it doesn't matter if he broke the rule once or twice

the point is he broke the rules, he also should've thought on his own like maybe i should not visit, when showing symptoms, for the safety of his elderly parents sake

he should've been sacked, and Boris failed to act properly (if Bojo had sacked him he would've gone up by a lot in my estimation also with all honesty)

[The Slim Reaper]

Something about burgers.

[The Slim Reaper]

Another tory campaigning for molehills!

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by The Slim Reaper

Another tory campaigning for molehills!

YUK what a sketty little #PickMe simp.

[rusticgal]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

It doesn't matter if you believe his account or not, his account is against the rules. Travelling to visit family was against the rules. Driving 30 miles to another location for exercise was against the rules. They might be going back and trying to change them now, but most of us have memories longer than a couple of weeks.
.

He did not visit his family....he stayed on the grounds separate from his family and he went there as a precaution. This was not breaking the rules...it was against all advice but it wasn’t against the rules.
However his journey to another location was against the rules...on that basis he should resign because his excuse was not plausible.

[The Slim Reaper]

Originally Posted by rusticgal

He did not visit his family....he stayed on the grounds separate from his family and he went there as a precaution. This was not breaking the rules...it was against all advice but it wasn’t against the rules.
However his journey to another location was against the rules...on that basis he should resign because his excuse was not plausible.

He drove 260 miles, not to visit his family, but stay in a cottage 50 meters away from them and his sister who was in another house on his parents estate. Is that what you're going with as not being against the rules when drivers were constantly being pulled over as they were on essential shopping trips?

[The Slim Reaper]

Marina Hyde

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ified-sack-him

Perhaps on Sunday you watched the entire nation being lectured on what constitutes fatherly responsibility by Boris Johnson, a man who won’t even say how many children he has, and leaves women to bring up an unspecified number of them. Perhaps on Monday you watched the Guardian’s Rowena Mason being lectured in journalism by Johnson, a man sacked from a newspaper for fabricating quotes from his own godfather, and who blithely discussed helping a friend to have another journalist beaten up. Perhaps today, you heard Michael Gove tell LBC he has “on occasion” driven a car to check his eyesight.

If you did see these things, I can only direct you to the slogan flyposted all over Paris during the 1968 civil unrest. “DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND – THERE IS A FAULT WITH REALITY.” The term “gaslighting” is much overused, but let’s break the glass on it for the events of the past few days. As for “indefensible”… well, I don’t think that word means what you thought it meant.

Anyway. I see the latest science Dominic Cummings knows more about than you is optometry. Half an hour late on Monday afternoon – like he’s Mariah Carey and not some spad in inside-out pants – the Islington-dwelling humanities graduate took to Downing Street’s rose garden. There, he delivered the most preposterous address to a nation since Tiger Woods stood in front of an audience, including his mother, and apologised to his wife and sponsors. The difference is that Woods had a problem with cocktail waitresses, while Cummings ****s entire public health messages in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Also, he’s not remotely sorry.

By now, you may be dimly aware that his wife showing coronavirus symptoms saw Cummings first return to Downing Street, then embark on what we might call an Odyssean project: a heroic 260-mile quest all the way to County Durham, breaking the spirit and letter of lockdown rules he helped to write. I guess he just wanted to be a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. Then, he explained, he embarked on a 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle, with his child in the car, to see if his eyes were so banjaxed that it was unsafe for him to drive. Which is … but no. I’m sorry, I just can’t with that one. Maybe later. Hopefully he’s at least nuked his car insurance premium.

Apologies for having to get tough with a guy who has always cultivated an image of himself as the Roy Keane of Westminster, even if that is like being the Clint Eastwood of the DVLA. But if Cummings and his wife didn’t know what they’d done was wrong, why would they choose to write a lengthy article last month about their virus experience – full of personal family information – which omitted all of these dramas, all of these material facts. Or as Cummings addressed these questions of what is unredeemable in the rose garden: “I stress to people that they should not believe everything in the newspapers.” And I stress to people that by far the most inaccurate account of the period in question was in the Spectator, bylined Mary Wakefield and Dominic Cummings. As for his querulous domestic exceptionalism, you’d think they were the first parents ever to get properly ill in possession of children. Or child, in this case. God knows, it’s not much fun. But, dare millions of us say, it is kind of what you sign up for – a reality not lost on the ICU nurse couple I heard on the radio, explaining about both of them being hard hit by Covid-19, and having to isolate with their own three children without help.

Cummings’ university history tutor once described him as “something like a Robespierre”, “determined to bring down things that don’t work”. Eleven years after his revolution, Robespierre himself was deemed to be something that didn’t really work, and was “brought down”, to euphemise the business of being relieved of your head in front of an ecstatic mob. I must say I found the footage of Cummings being screamed at in his street on Sunday distinctly disturbing when set alongside his account of his family’s house having become a target for threats of violence. This is never right.

Part of what’s disturbing was the vignette of a Britain Cummings himself did much to foment: grimly polarised, reflexively aggressive and running with an undercurrent of menace. His crowning triumph – the successful campaign to leave the EU – was a masterclass of stoking and exploiting divisions, unpleasantly emotive half-truths or untruths, and evidently considered itself above the law. I wrote last year about the dangerous folly of whipping up people versus parliament narratives, and how quickly those who imagine themselves on the side of the people can suddenly be reclassified as an enemy politician. But even I would have thought it too neat, too written, for Cummings to find himself on the wrong end of his sorcery as quickly as he has been. The thing about playing to angry mobs is that eventually they get angry with you. They came for Robespierre in the end, too.

For all the draw of the Cummings character, though, the last few days are ultimately a terrible story about Johnson. “Wash your hands, wash your hands” the prime minister kept gibbering last night. He’s certainly washing his hands of it all. All populists secretly hate their people, and Johnson is no different. But that “secretly” is key. His decision to keep Cummings brings his contempt for those he is meant to serve into the open. He would rather endanger their lives by compromising a vital public health strategy.

But why? The thing about Johnson is that he desperately wanted to become prime minister, and he desperately wanted to have been prime minister. It’s just the bit in between he struggles with. With Othello, it was jealousy. Macbeth: ambition. Lear: pride. Johnson: career liar, hollowed out by narcissism, who not even his friends would joke was motivated by public service. I guess it’s the little things that trip you up, isn’t it?

Anyone who imagines his defence of Cummings is born of loyalty is unfamiliar with the concept “Boris Johnson”. This is actually a simple story: man with no ideas is too terrified to sack his ideas man. Or to put it in the complex intellectual terms it deserves, some street heckler once shouted at David Hasselhoff: “Oi! Hasselhoff! You’re nothing without your talking car!” Cummings is the talking car to Johnson’s Hasselhoff.

So here we are. Cummings stays, and only irresistible external events will make Johnson do the right thing. He is not himself capable. We have the highest death toll in Europe, we left the care homes to their fate, our test-and-trace blunders are an international embarrassment, and we didn’t even save our economy. Johnson takes daily runs, but appears only once or twice a week in a crisis to fail at leadership.

This is the utter smallness of the man, and the tragedy for everyone stuck being governed by him. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the acceptance. It would be nice to think we’re not so beaten that we don’t expect better than what he’s given us. After all, lives literally depend on it.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

[arista]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

They are almost identical circumstances.

Rubbish.

[arista]

Marina Hyde she is not talking Facts.
Slim.

[Toy Soldier]

"Rubbish! False! Fake news!!"

You could at least TRY to form a counter-argument instead of just huffing "NO" from the corner

[parmnion]

The mcanns leave 4 kids alone until one of them is gone forever....adored by the media.


Tory advisor acts in childs best interested....hated by the media..


You have to laugh at how easy they can sway peoples opinions.

[The Slim Reaper]

Originally Posted by arista

Marina Hyde she is not talking Facts.
Slim.

Marina even makes special mention of folks like your goodself that bought into the people versus elites stuff. I just miss the arista of 3 days ago that treated the situation on it's merits, as you did with covid, rather than the reactionary one that lost his sanity when cummings was held to account.

[Oliver_W]

Originally Posted by parmnion

The mcanns leave 4 kids alone until one of them is gone forever....adored by the media.


Tory advisor acts in childs best interested....hated by the media..


You have to laugh at how easy they can sway peoples opinions.

The media, sure.

I don't know a single person who likes the McCanns and/or who thinks they're entirely innocent or blame-free.

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by parmnion

The mcanns leave 4 kids alone until one of them is gone forever....adored by the media.

Adored by The Sun, most normal people condemn their actions.

Tory advisor acts in childs best interests...

Tory minister uses his child as an excuse to visit the countryside for a couple of Birthday parties.

[Liam-]

Originally Posted by The Slim Reaper

Marina even makes special mention of folks like your goodself that bought into the people versus elites stuff. I just miss the arista of 3 days ago that treated the situation on it's merits, as you did with covid, rather than the reactionary one that lost his sanity when cummings was held to account.

I miss when he called me wise and slick