A photo has been published showing Boris Johnson stood next to a bottle of bubbly at what appears to be a Christmas event in Downing Street.…
…At the time, No 10 said the PM only “briefly took part virtually” to thank staff for their work during the pandemic…
…At the time of the event, London was under Tier Two restrictions, which banned mixing of households indoors - apart from support bubbles - and allowed a maximum of six people to meet outside.
Official guidance said: “Although there are exemptions for work purposes, you must not have a work Christmas lunch or party, where that is a primarily social activity and is not otherwise permitted by the rules in your tier.”
An opinion: the fact that these things are leaking all the time doesn’t just tell you that the rules were being ignored; it also tells you that someone has it in for Johnson (or several people have it in for him). And they’re doing a pretty good job.
it also tells you that someone has it in for Johnson (or several people have it in for him)
Dominic Cummings is overtly out to unseat him. That’s no secret. Whether he already had all these photos off his own bat, or is getting them from other disgruntled insiders, less so: but releasing them in a steady trickle is all part of his cunning plan (did I read somewhere that he has explicitly said so?).
BJ and a bottle of champagne? Obviously he thought that’s what was meant by support bubbles.
"The prime minister and our present government not only challenge the law, but also seem to believe that they, and they alone, need not obey the rules, traditions, conventions - call them what you will - of public life.
"The charge that there is one law for the government, and one for everyone else is politically deadly - and it has struck home.
When ministers respond to legitimate questions with pre-prepared sound bites, or half-truths, or misdirection, or wild exaggeration, then respect for government and politics dies a little more."
Will the mess in Ukraine help Boris hang on a little longer? It pushes the scandal off the front pages, and an international crisis is a time to come together and not a time to change leaders. So my naive view is that he’s safe so long as the crisis is ongoing, and if it goes on long enough may allow him to discount his old errors as being “old news”.
@Novelty_Bobble This is the politics I was talking about in the COVID thread. I do suspect that part of the reason for the actions of the UK is to distract from the issue with Johnson flouting COVID rules.
Boris, Biden & Macron are all looking domestically threatened and are attempting to appear tough and show resolve for their home electorates. What gives any of them the right to threaten Putin? particularly Biden from the comfort of six thousand miles distance between him in The White House, and the Ukraine/Russian border?
… and yes, Boris should go, but for many other reasons as well
Nobody’s threatening Putin. They’re telling him they won’t do business with him or his country. And if he literally invades a NATO country they will defend themselves. Not sure if that’s really such a terrible threat to Putin, nor is it particularly unreasonable.
Putin runs Russia like a mafia boss, if someone were to actually threaten Putin in such a way as to cut him down a peg, they would be doing the Russian people a big favour - though only a few Russians seem to understand that thanks to his grip on Russian media. If the West had been acting ethically they would have stopped doing any business with Russia years ago, but self-interest and economics prevail.
With the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 Russia (USSR) made an orderly withdrawal from the DDR on the promise that NATO would not advance any further towards its borders, but NATO led by the US has reneged on those promises and wishes to put Ukraine under the aegis of NATO, thereby bringing the Western influence and armour right to the frontier of Russia; what would you do? All that is necessary is to stick to those original promises, it is the West that is the provocateur, not Putin.
Yes. It pushes the parties scandal into the back pages and offers Johnson the opportunity to take positive actions. It certainly helped him before Putin declared Russian supported provinces of Ukraine as independent states. The sanctions Johnsons announced since then have been equated to peashooters. But they could also be equated to “keeping your powder dry”. I think there’s an overall populist UK wish for the UK to oppose Russia, and certainly support for Ukraine independence. Johnson’s support for those goals will be popular, and as long as he backs those goals, it will be harder for opponents to remove him from the office of Prime Minister.