to think Dominic Cummings should go/thread 3

[SophieB100]

Third thread!

That wasn't just you. He tried to drown us all in (dull) detail.

Isn't this straight out of The West Wing?

All through this afternoon's performance I was thinking, this is the episode where the nuclear power station melts down and Arni Vinick attempts to bore the press by talking for incredibly long and in tedious detail, so they'll be exhausted and overwhelmed and assume that because he "gave an explanation" that makes it OK.

Erm, depends what the explanation is, folks!

He didn’t break the rules, they clearly allowed anyone to seek help if they needed it. None of us know the degree of symptoms they had, or what other health issues they might have. Maybe they were scared they couldn’t manage? All valid reasons to seek help

He was afraid neither of them was well enough to care for their child yet were well enough to drive 260 miles. OK.

He wasn’t in contact with anyone at any point, thus couldn’t have spread anything

He left his wife, who he suspected of having Covid looking after their child alone and returned to work. The wife who was too ill to parent. He mixed with his colleagues at no 10.

For a 4 year old to need a wee during a car drive is hardly uncommon

Indeed, yet he didn’t need one on the 260 mile journey to Durham ...

Taking a test drive because you’ve been very unwell to see how you fare before a long drive seems pretty reasonable to me ( as someone who used to live hours away from the nearest help as a single mum and someone who has medical conditions which mean flu can and does floor me. I’m not risking my child finds me unconscious on the floor - yes it’s happened but thankfully I’d had the foresight to get to help 2 days before hand)

So you care so much about your child yet risk him on a journey when you’re not sure you can drive safely. When your wife can drive so you don’t need to.

I wonder why he had to go to Barnard Castle.

Thanks to another thread I think I know the answer now.

Apparently, his sister is a director of idox, the company for the track and trace app.
She lives in Durham.
Glaxo smithkleine, the company sharing the contract to develop a #Covid19UK vaccine are based on Barnard Castle.

That's pretty WOWsy.

The Idox software company which provides electoral services?

From January this year:

Why did Cabinet Office Rush through Procurement of Controversial Electoral Services Company IDOX Just Before the General Election?
bylinetimes.com/2020/01/07/why-did-cabinet-office-rush-through-procurement-of-controversial-electoral-services-company-idox-just-before-the-general-election/

A large software company whose shareholders include Brexiter and former Conservative Cabinet minister Peter Lilley has been given a lucrative contract by the Cabinet Office without competitive tendering to revamp the management of the electoral register in extraordinary circumstances.
[...]
The extraordinary part of the new contract is how it is being rushed through by the Government.

The policy to reform canvassing the electoral register was only announced in September as Boris Johnson arrived in Downing Street, though the Cabinet Office had been working on drawing up a reform since 2015. Idox was awarded its £1.7m contract on 25 October 2019 and the first phase of work was begun on 1 November, four days before the legislation to enable it was written. This first phase completed by the beginning of December, two weeks before the General Election, even though the legislation did not come into force until the end of December.

Around the same time as the annual canvas was announced, leaked memos published by Buzzfeed News revealed that Johnson’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings was insisting that the Cabinet Office collected data from all government digital services as a “top priority”.

What he did was against the stricter rules that were in place at the time. Which were very very clear.

If you are worried about your fitness to drive, then you load your family into the car and take them 30 miles to a beautiful tourist attraction? Come off it.

Yes I think he's a liar and more than happy to say so. Do do the media, even much of the 'right wing' media, some Tory MPs, and all the people I've spoken to today.

OK, so the electoral services company is Idox Software; the one of which Alice Sarah Louise Cummings became a director on 14 Apr 2020 is Idox PLC.

Same correspondence address, same company secretary, many of the same directors.

The Idox software company which provides electoral services?

I assume it must be although that is also news to me.
I'm going to have a good trawl tomorrow.

The fact that they have chosen a bunch of their mates to build an app rather than go with the one that Google and Apple have developed is. Well. I was going to mince my words but it's really dodgy. There have been other threads on it so I won't derail this one.

I mean, I've no idea whether the sudden appointment of the PM's most senior advisor's sister to a company getting a key govt contract has any connection to his inexcusable trip north during CV lockdown.

And I've no idea if any of that has any connection to GSK whatsoever. It might not.

But Cummings was so obviously lying about the purpose of the trip to Castle Barnard. And the problem with liars is you don't know where their lies begin and end.

Okay so I'm definitely going to switch off in a moment but have to post this

Clive Lewis MP on Twitter

How interesting: “On 12 April Dominic Cummings was seen in Castle Barnard during lockdown. Two days later, GlaxoSmithKline of Barnard Castle signed an agreement to develop and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine with Sanofi of France.

Of course, that could be coincidence.”

Cummings really is right up his own if he thinks he can get away with it.

I don't understand why he was actually allowed to give a press conference. He's just some SPAD - they come and go, the nature of the job. Why is he so important he's kept at the very real risk of bringing down the government?

As for the story that was spun, it's clear they've just sat down, made some sort of timeline with what's been reported about him and cobbled some sheer crap together to fit. Normally I'm very much against the idea of the press sitting on a story for political reasons - if something important has been found out then, in the public interest, it should be told immediately and in full with no game-playing, dodgy backroom deals to suppress it completely or sitting on it to get some personal advantage. But in this case I really hope something has been kept back to really blow it out of the water, not that it's needed.

The Press (to DC): “Will you at least acknowledge that you broke the rules?”

I can be a senior advisor to the country.

But I need my wife to advise me that it's a good idea to test if my eye sight before I drive 260 miles.

I'm most cross now that so much government time is being given to this. It's not like there's nothing else to work on...

Most of the story would have been OK (except did they or didn't they think she had Covid, which is kind of key) but the drive to test the eyesight is so ridiculous it shows what they all think of the public and if true would have been an outrageously dangerous thing to do. Also trying to justify being seen in woods because they were "private" when they obviously have public footpaths and the rest of us have been confined to, at best, small gardens, just shows how remote they are from most people's reality.

Plus the monumental cock up of the first attempt to deal with it.

The fact that he never considered resigning speaks volumes. During 2 days of wtf do we do now, he never once said "PM, would it be better all round if I resigned?" ?

If I admitted to driving a car with a child and adult passenger on a public road when I wasnt sure if I could see properly, wouldn't the police be concerned?
Isn't offering such a ridiculous explanation a car crash in itself?

Let’s face it, it’s a story not many authors would be proud of. Most of it makes no sense, either because it’s lies or because there are chunks of it missing. If anyone even falls for the childcare claim (which they weren’t actually ill enough to use) and the fact that they have no one closer than 250miles to help them, then the trip to Barnard castle and the wandering around the woods part is rule breaking as testing your eyesight is not a valid reason. The fact that he was testing it to see if he could come back to work and help us all (!) is another reason why he should have stayed in London. Put together with the fact it was his wives birthday that same day makes it all a bit odd. The fact that he collected his wife and child from hospital less than 7 days after showing symptoms also broke the rules- why didn’t he get his sister or nieces to help given that was the whole point of the trip there? There is no way he can claim that all of it was justified so rules have been broken (tbh I don’t believe any of it was justified but struggle to believe anyone could justify all of it)

Yesterday his story was almost laughable ( if it weren't so serious) in how contrived and ridiculous it was - like a 6 year old caught doing something naughty who tells lie after even more ridiculous and.unnelievable lie to get out of it. But the people on here twisting themselves in the most ridiculous knots to defend the utter crsp he spouted is even funnier

Let’s face it, it’s a story not many authors would be proud of.

Agreed. Given that his wife is a writer by profession, you'd think they could have come up with something half decent

He's a Dom and we're all Subs .

The thing I picked up on was his statement that he knew there was a possibility of a pandemic a while back! Why were we so on the back foot for ppe etc if this was the case?
There seems to be loads going on here with his sisters involvement with the new app too.

Some people can be really good at their job but are absolutely hopeless with dealing with their own circumstances when things go wrong
He believes what he did for his family was the right thing so unlikely to apologise
Seems his wife went into panic mode and he followed

@ anne

His wife is perfectly able to drive (she wrote an article in the Spectator in 2012 about driving in the US) and could have driven them home from Durham. No test drive to Barnard Castle needed.

Woman on GMB now saying if he'd stayed at home and got childcare in should him and wife have been really ill he'd been vilified for that.

Erm no. You could go to someone's house to provide care.

But importantly. They'd have had and should have had to do what everyone else in the country did and had to do.

Yes Rosie, that's what I took from it too. Two educated accomplished people seem to have gone into absolute panic over a sickness bug.

If I rang DH who was in an important meeting because I felt unwell with a 4yo, I'd probably expect him to come home as soon as he could but I'm not sure I'd expect him to drop everything and run!