Cost of Freedom

The Prime Minister said when Sue Gray’s report was released on Wednesday that the hundreds of billions spent on dealing with the pandemic had left the UK in a "very difficult fiscal position", or to put it another way, our cost of living crisis is actually a £370 billion cost of lockdown crisis. 

I'm not writing this with the benefit of hindsight, as I always thought lockdowns achieved nothing, but Sue Gray's report tells us that Boris, Party Marty Reynolds and the rest of the Downing Street Frat boys clearly didn't believe in them either.

And they appear to have got away with everything!

They have got away with trashing our economy, imposing lockdowns and even breaking those oh-so-important lockdowns on multiple occasions because large numbers of people still believe that lockdowns were a good, some sort of necessary evil.  

The general public will not accept otherwise because they don’t want to believe what is (and in my opinion always was) something very obvious: we were subjected to three absolutely pointless lockdowns. 

That the government didn’t believe in these rules is evidenced by the fact that while you were having your cancer treatment cancelled or your small business closed down again, Downing Street was partying to the extent that at one point there were so many empties the bin was overflowing. 

The truth is that the public don't want to believe that all the pain was for nothing. It would be embarrassing for them to contemplate the thought that they'd collaborated with their own needless oppression, which as John Tierney in City Journal says, "Adults meekly surrendered their most basic liberties, cheered on leaders who devastated the economy and imposed two years of cruel and unnecessary deprivations on their children. They don’t want to admit that these sacrifices were in vain".

The Sue Gray report also tells us what many of us have known for many years: we already knew: Boris Johnson lacks discipline, character, maturity, integrity and any sense of responsibility.

While everybody's local pub was closed, the Downing Street gang were having "work events" which consisted of drinking in the afternoon, getting into fights, vomiting, spilling red wine, leaving at 2am and were responsible for "multiple examples of lack of respect and poor treatment of cleaning and security staff".

Under Johnson’s premiership, the "work force" under him have trashed the office of the government, trashed the economy with lockdown and they have trashed the country. 

So if you think that our political elite are laughing at you, it is because they are laughing at you. 

If you feel they've "got away with it", it is because they have got away with it, and if, like me, you think that maybe you shouldn’t have gone along with the masochistic lockdowns, then it’s because you shouldn’t have gone along with them. 

Lockdown – the joke is on us.  

Many a Slip Twixt Cup (or Glass) and Lip

After Downing Street apparently pulled Grant Shapps from the media round yesterday (Sky said he'd been due to appear), the unenviable job of defending the Prime Minister was given to the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis just after Jacob Rees-Mogg added fuel to the Partygate fire by describing Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross as a “lightweight“.

Speaking on Sky News, Lewis said:

“It’s difficult to explain, but the reality of how Downing Street works – and the garden is actually an integral part of Downing Street – I absolutely can see the logic of the Prime Minister going outside to talk to the staff who’ve been working together and focused on things around Covid all day…”

So not only did Mr Lewis follow his leader by failing to offer up any sort of clarification as to what a "work event" was (or is?) when there was nothing in the guidance other than instructions/orders telling us to go to work only if was essential or stay at home, he also claimed that the Prime Minister went "outside to talk to the staff who’ve been working together"; a statement made using the past tense!

Did he mis-speak? Was it a subconscious slip of the tongue because he's well aware that working staff tend not to hang around gardens sharing bottles of wine? Or has he simply assumed that it wasn't anything like a "work event" (whatever that means) and that's why he claimed the staff "had been" working together, not "were" as should have been the case had the gathering in groups (as it was described at PMQs yesterday) not been social when Boris went out to congratulate people on a job well done, even though not all the "attendees" even worked at Downing Street!!